Manual duplex printing with OSX presets

Duplex printing means printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. There are many printers supporting automatic duplex, so the printer takes care of printing on the front- and on the backside without user interaction. But especially low-cost printers don’t support this very useful feature that not only saves paper but also space. That’s where manual duplex comes into play: print odd and even pages in two passes, using the backsides of the first pass as input for the second one. I set up two print presets in OS X that help me printing the pages in the right order.

The short story: Pass 1 prints only even pages and in reverse order (see Paper Handling), Pass 2 odd pages in normal order.

If you’re lucky, this setup works for your printer, but here’s some more background information. There are some pitfalls we have to take care of. First of all, what happens if the second pass prints more pages than the first one? Then the additional page needs to be the last one of the document, as that’s the one without a backside. As a consequence, Pass 2 needs to print in normal order. And because this can only happen if the total number of pages is odd, we print only odd pages.

Now let’s have a look at Pass 1. Even pages are still missing, so select them. The order is highly depending on your printer, especially the way and the order it pulls in the sheets of paper in the second pass. My printer first selects the top most sheet, expecting the white side heading to top. Remember, Pass 2 prints page 2 first, so make sure page 1 is put on the other side. In my case that means using reverse order.

That’s the way it works for a Samsung ML-2010R, but I think you got the idea. After some test prints, your manual duplex is ready to go. As soon as you finished your setup, chose your document, print using Pass 1 preset, then put the stack of paper back into your printer and print again, this time using Pass 2. Done! Manual duplex the easy way.