dual-sided printing?

[Constantine Evans]

All printers in Linux look like Postscript printers to the lp command. 
If the printer does not take Postscript, the lp command converts the 
file first.

The lp command also converts abitrary other formats before printing, as 
described in /etc/cups/mime.conf. Unfortunately, Ubuntu's setup is very 
poor in that regard. It will print PDFs directly, and images, but it is 
not set up to print html correctly (it looks like it prints the source 
instead).

In general, the easiest way to do this is to export the file to PDF, 
which nearly everything in Ubuntu can do, and then print that with lp. 
If you are using this for everyday printing, as opposed to just the 
occasional large print job, then it can be rather tedious..

I will discuss the dismal file type support in CUPS with some people, 
and will hopefully be able to improve that situation in future versions. 
I am also thinking about writing a program to do this, since it 
shouldn't be that hard. I'm just not sure right now how the program 
would tie in to the GNOME printer dialog, since it does not have the 
filter options that the KDE dialog has.

Constantine

David Abrahams wrote:
> Constantine Evans <constantine at evanslabs.org> writes:
> 
>> One thing you don't need to do is buy TurboPrint.
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> lp -o page-set=even -o outputorder=reverse document.ps
>>
>> {take paper and put it in the tray}
>>
>> lp -o page-set=odd document.ps
> 
> Do I presume correctly that those commands work only with Postscript
> printers, and whatever file I'm printing needs to be data in a format
> recognized by the printer?  In other words, no direct printing of
> .html, .doc, .pdf, etc. files without first generating postscript (or
> some other printer-native format)?
> 
> It would be great if I were wrong, but if I'm right it would hardly be
> worth the effort in most cases.  I'd rather shell out some bucks for
> TuboPrint if it makes things easy.
>