print on both sides of the paper, my workaround for multiple copies

[David Fletcher]

May I start on a clean sheet to say that:-

The only time I remember printing being trouble free was when I was
using my first ever printer, the Brother M-1109, a neat little dot
matrix impact, parallel interface printer, with a tractor feed, with my
BBC model B computer.

Since then it's been a right PITA especially getting double sided
printing out of non duplex printers. Since the M-1109 I've been through
Canon, HP and Epson ink jets. The Epson was probably the least
troublesome, lasting until it started to become difficult to obtain
replacement cartridges.

Now, I'm back to a Brother printer, the HL-3040CN which is a single
sided colour laser printer. I use my home server as a print server,
which the first time around (Ubuntu 14.04 I believe) it was a right
nightmare to get set up. Since then I found the fantastic installer
script provided by Brother to set up Linux computers to operate with
their devices. Look for linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.3-1.gz or later
on the Brother web site. It works with combined printer/scanner devices
too.

I expect everyone has their own favourite workarounds to do double
sided printing. My printer takes paper from the top of the tray and
puts the single side printed sheets face down on the output tray so
that when I turn them over and put them back into the paper tray they
get picked up again in the same order so in my case I need to print
even sheets first, forward order, collated, then the same with the odd
sheets.

This USED to work absolutely fine but suddenly the damned system
started adding a blank sheet at the end of each of multiple copies of
the even sheets of which there might be ten for providing driving
routes for the classic car club. No good.

What I do now is, get LibreOffice to print to a pdf file instead of to
the printer, with the same options set as for the printer i.e. multiple
copies, collate, one file for even sheets and another for odd sheets.
This appears to work fine without the superfluous blank sheets. Both
files need to have the same number of pages. Finally, open the evens
file with the document viewer and print one copy. Turn the sheets over
back into the input paper tray (printed even numbered sides face up)
and now use the document viewer to print the odd sides pdf file.

Job done.

Mental gymnastics can be required to figure out the procedure to do
this for other printers. For example IIRC the Epson inkjet took sheets
from the bottom of the stack so, reverse order in one of the sides
might be required. Suggest the writing of a procedure to refer to each
time to save materials and temper!