Trying to duplex pdf to a windows shared printer

[Michael Sillers]

I am trying to duplex print a pdf file sent to a windows shared printer. Has anyone tried this before?

I've tried using acroread and ghostscript to convert the file to post script but the best results I've gotten so far is to have the printer feed the paper through the duplex but print each page as though it is a new print job (i.e.: the back of the page is blank and the next page prints on a new page). This was using ghostscript and the ljet4d device.

Any ideas would be greatly appreceated.

[Michael Sillers]

A clarification - I am running HP-UX 11.11 (11i), ghostscript 8.56 and acroread 5.

[OldSchool]

if your using windows as the print server (ie. remote printing), I believe you need to set the queue on the Windows machine to default to duplex (and which "edge").

If you're printing to a "network" printer (that windows just happens to connect to as well), then see this thread:

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1386219

or there should be an option in the lp command to set duplex on....there should be a man page, something along the lines of net_lj4x

[Michael Sillers]

Thanks for your suggestions. I tried to duplex on the windows queue but there seems to be some issue in getting the PDF into a printable format using lp. The generated code seems to have page feeds between each page! I did have some success this morning using something called pdftops (part of xpdf) which accepts simply -duplex - something I couldn't get acrobat or ghostscript to do. I can then use the lp command to print to any ps compatible printer and it duplexes. - That's a lot better than yesterday.

We do still have a problem in that several of our printers only support pcl so I'm stil stuck trying to get them to duplex. When converting ps to pcl I haven't been able to get it to keep the duplexing but it's still early stages of that.

[Dennis Handly]

>there seems to be some issue in getting the PDF into a printable format using lp

You may have to use "-o post".

>that several of our printers only support PCL

Then than may not work either.

[Michael Sillers]

Thanks for the ideas so far...

Here's where I stand now.

I am able to get PDF to PS with duplexing using pdftops 0 part of xpdf.

Now I need to get ps to pcl with duplexing intact. Ghostscript output feeds the paper through the duplexing unit but still only prints on one side.

I've seen others report the same problem but never any resolution.

[Michael Sillers]

Original issue has been resolved and remaining issues belong in a separate post.