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On 10/12/12 22:48, bad apple wrote: > On 10/12/12 21:24, Neil Winchurst wrote: >> Recently bought an HP Photosmart 5520 printer. Very good so far. >> However, according to the info with the printer itself it is supposed >> to support 2-sided printing. By this I take it to mean it will print >> page 1 say on a sheet of paper and then pick up the same sheet again >> and print page 2 on the other side. >> >> I have had a good search around, but must be missing something. Can >> anyone (bad apple??) point me in the right direction please? I realise >> that I could do it all manually, but as it is supposed to be able to >> do it for me I might as well try to get it to work. >> >> Thanks >> >> Neil >> > There is no way a basic inkjet printer such as your new HP will have the > actual hardware for duplex printing, by which I mean the ability to suck > the stack of printed paper back in and print straight to the other side > - that's strictly a higher end feature, and usually only found on high > quality inkjets for graphics shops and big laserjets. What HP mean when > they say it supports 2-sided printing is that it will indeed do duplex > (you may need to check a print dialogue setting before you send the job > to the printer) but your hands will be the physical method of conveying > the half-printed stack of sheets back to the feed tray. The printer will > be smart enough (probably!) to prompt you via it's little built-in > screen or by a dialogue box on your monitor that when it's finished > printing the first side, to take out the stack, flip it along one or > more of it's axis, and feed the stack back in to finish up. This is more > useful than it sounds, as otherwise you'll probably end up printing one > side upside down, or get the page order backwards, etc. So it's sort of > 'half manual' duplex if you see what I mean. You still have to feed the > paper, but it should take care of the rest itself. > > Obviously, it would be wise to test this on a small (4-5 pages of very > minimal text to save ink) job first to make sure it works properly > before sending a complete copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels or something > as a duplex job. > > Hope that makes sense. > > Cheers > We have a HP 6500 all-in-one at work, which is fairly low end. The version we have does support duplex, but there are various versions which don't and you can only tell the difference through the HP model number. There was also a bug in HPLIP at the time, where even if you had installed the latest version of HPLIP from the HPLIP website, it didn't overwrite the residual printer description file and I had to manually edit it to enable duplexing. Try using lpr which connects to CUPS directly (lpr -o sides=two-sided-long-edge filename). You might need to create a pdf first if your file format is something lpr doesn't understand, and there are other options to lpr if you're not printing to your default printer. Phil -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq