lpr and duplex printing

[girarde]

So I have a Brother laser, which digests PS output from apps pretty well. This is good.

Sometimes I have a multiple page PDF to print, though, and LibreOffice -current wants to make those into drawings and do stupid things to the margins, individually,

on

every

single

page.

lpr will print the file, but the OpenBSD lpr doesn't seem to have an -o (options) switch, let alone -o sides=two-sided-long-edge.

How do people deal with this?

[fvgit]

Don't have a duplex printer myself, so I can't test. There's a trick mentioned on misc@ where you have to add

%!
<</Duplex true>>setpagedevice

to the beginning of the postscript file you send to your printer. That means you'd have to set up a little input filter that inserts that line to the beginning of your postscript input after the conversion from PDF format but before it gets sent to the printer. Shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Some web hints suggest just putting the second line inbetween the page setup lines:

%%BeginPageSetup
<< /Duplex true >> setpagedevice
%%EndPageSetup

You could try editing a postscript document manually first, and see if it works. And if it does write your own input filter.

PS: A test file grabbed from the web:

%!
<<
  /Duplex true
>> setpagedevice

/Courier 72 selectfont
72 648 moveto
(PAGE 1) show
showpage

72 648 moveto
(PAGE 2) show
showpage

Good luck experimenting and don't forget to report back.

[girarde]

Originally Posted by fvgit

Don't have a duplex printer myself, so I can't test. There's a trick mentioned on misc@ where you have to add

%!
<</Duplex true>>setpagedevice

to the beginning of the postscript file you send to your printer. That means you'd have to set up a little input filter that inserts that line to the beginning of your postscript input after the conversion from PDF format but before it gets sent to the printer. Shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Some web hints suggest just putting the second line inbetween the page setup lines:

%%BeginPageSetup
<< /Duplex true >> setpagedevice
%%EndPageSetup

You could try editing a postscript document manually first, and see if it works. And if it does write your own input filter.

PS: A test file grabbed from the web:

%!
<<
  /Duplex true
>> setpagedevice

/Courier 72 selectfont
72 648 moveto
(PAGE 1) show
showpage

72 648 moveto
(PAGE 2) show
showpage

Good luck experimenting and don't forget to report back.

Tested this file, and it worked. More later

[shep]

On a Brother HL-5450DN, I setup foomatic-rip as a filter.
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=8710

Then added print queues for duplex letter and #10 envelopes.

My /usr/local/libexec/br_filter_duplex

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/foomatic-rip -P Brother-HL-5450DN \
 -ppd /etc/foomatic/direct/Brother-HL-5450DN-BR-Script3.ppd \
 -o PageSize=Letter -o DuplexNoTumble