Duplex (Two-Sided) Printing

Many of the Department printers are capable of Duplex (two-sided printing). Using this feature can save on paper and reduce the height of stacked paper on your desk. This page describes how to use duplex printing on Department managed systems.

There are two types of duplex printing: Long-Edge Binding and Short-Edge Binding. Long-Edge binding will produce pages that would be flipped left to right (like a book), Short-Edge binding will produce pages that would be turned vertically (like a sketch pad).

Printers Supporting Duplex Printing

The following printers support duplex printing:

Other personal printers may also support duplexing. If you are unsure please send a message to help@math.ku.edu.

Duplex Printing on Mac OS X

Duplex printing on Mac OS X is simple and well supported.

1. Open the Print dialog as normal.
2. Open the bottom drop down menu (it defaults to Copies & Pages) and choose Layout.
3. Select your binding preference from the Two-Sided: option.
4. Make any other changes to printer settings and click Print.

Select the Layout preferences.

Choose your Binding method.

Duplex Printing on Linux

Most printers that support duplex printing have two queues associated with them. For instance the 455 Lab printer has queues named q455 and q455-d. Queue names that end in -d will automatically default to long-edge binding duplex printing.

The method of setting the desired printer queue will (unfortunately) vary from application to application. Most applications will give you a list of printer queues with names similar to q455 or CUPS/q455. For these applications simply choose the -d variant of the queue name.

Command Line

If you are printing from the command line just append -d to the desired queue:

[user@snow455-01 ~]$ lp -d q455-d somefile.pdf

Alternatively you can specify the options and use the non -d queue:

[user@snow455-01 ~]$ lp -d q455 -o sides=two-sided-long-edge somefile.pdf

Using this method you can also specify additional options such as number-up which allows you to print multiple scaled down pages on a single sheet of paper:

[user@snow455-01 ~]$ lp -d q455 -o number-up=4 somefile.pdf

See the CUPS Options Documentation for a full description of available options.

Instructions for Specific Applications

Adobe Acrobat

After choosing the print command in Adobe Acrobat adjust the Printer Command as you would when printing from the command line. For instance entering lp -d q405-d would duplex print to the Snow 405 printer.