2.2.4 Printing Duplex

If you still want to save more paper, and you are amongst the set of happy users of Duplex printers, a2ps will also be able to help you (See Glossary, for definitions). The option to specify Duplex printing is ‘--sides=mode’ (see PostScript Options).

Here is how to print the documentation in Duplex and send it to the Duplex printer ‘margot’:

quasimodo ~ a2ps/doc $ a2ps -s2 -Pmargot a2ps.texi
[a2ps.texi (texinfo, delegated to texi2dvi): 109 pages on 28 sheets]
[Total: 110 pages on 28 sheets] sent to the printer `margot'

This is also valid for several files.

Actually, you can do something even more tricky: print a small book! This is much more complicated than printing Duplex, because the pages needs to be completely reorganized another way. This is precisely the job of psbook, yet another PsUtil from Angus Duggan. But there is a user option which encapsulates the magic sequence of options: ‘book’. Therefore, just run

quasimodo a2ps/doc $ a2ps -=book -Pmargot a2ps.texi
[a2ps.texi (texinfo, delegated to texi2dvi): 109 pages on 109 sheets]
[Total: 109 pages on 109 sheets] sent to the printer `margot'

and voila‘ !, a booklet printed on margot!

We strongly discourage you to try with several files at once, because the tools then easily get lost. And, after all, the result will be exactly the same once you collated all the booklets together.

Another limitation is that this does not work if it is not sent to a printer. This kind of weird limitations will be solved in the future.