Can Publisher do duplex printing???

[Birk Binnard]

I need to print a monthly bulletin on a Ricoh 1075 printer/copier. The
printer will do duplex printing: I created a Word document and it prints
duplex A-OK.

My Publisher document is 16 logical pages 8.5x11 which I want to print
duplex 2-up on 4 11x17 physical pages. I can get the pages to print
2-up a-ok, but I can't get the pages to print duplex. I've tried every
possible print layout setting there is....duplex, booklet, you name it.
No matter what I do the pages come out one sided.

There must be some trick I'm missing, but what could it be? I searched
the MS Knowledge Base but could find nothing on duplex or booklet printing.

 

[Ed Bennett]

I need to print a monthly bulletin on a Ricoh 1075 printer/copier. The
printer will do duplex printing: I created a Word document and it
prints duplex A-OK.

Did you try to print duplex A3 or duplex A4?

There must be some trick I'm missing, but what could it be? I
searched the MS Knowledge Base but could find nothing on duplex or
booklet printing.

Two words: Printer Drivers. The duplex feature is one of your printer, and
is entirely out of Publisher's hands. It is controlled entirely by the
software for your printer (and the firmware, of course). Updating drivers
and/or firmware should fix the issue; if not, ask Ricoh support. And don't
let them tell you it's a Publisher problem.

 

[Birk Binnard]

I posted the problem here because I did verify the printer will print
duplex just fine from Word. This tells me the printer & printer driver
work OK. It's Publisher that does not print duplex. Seems to me that
indicates a problem with Publisher, no?

 

[Birk Binnard]

As I stated in my original post, I used Word to verify the printer can
print duplex A-OK. So yes, the printer is a duplex printer.

The pages of the bulletin are 8.5 x 11. If you use 11x17 paper in
Landscape mode you can put 2 logical pages on one physical page, both
front and back. Then if you fold the 11x17 pages in half you get a nice
little booklet.

I did try the booklet setting and all other combinations I could think
of, but I only got single sided prints out of the printer.

 

[Birk Binnard]

I did not try using A3 or A4 -- I thought these were European size paper
settings.

I previously answered your comment about printer drivers.

 

[Ed Bennett]

I posted the problem here because I did verify the printer will print
duplex just fine from Word. This tells me the printer & printer
driver work OK. It's Publisher that does not print duplex. Seems to
me that indicates a problem with Publisher, no?

Nope.

Publisher has no control over the functionality of your printer driver.

Publisher cannot and will never be able to control the duplex functionality
of your printer. That must be done in your printer driver.

Publisher does, however, require that you have a fully-functional printer
driver. Many applications are more tolerant about printer drivers, as they
don't make as extensive use of the various driver calls (or whatever they
use, as I haven't studied the Windows printing interface in that great
detail). Publisher and other DTP applications put much higher demands on
their drivers, so the worse-written drivers are less likely to function
correctly.

Do you believe me yet? Sarah already explained the problem once:

(and I don't care if "all my other apps print fine" DTP applications are
a LOT more fussy about drivers).

All I've done is attempt to phrase it in a different way. If you choose to
post back AGAIN saying "But Word prints fine", I'll be forced to get really
quite annoyed.

 

[Ed Bennett]

I did not try using A3 or A4 -- I thought these were European size
paper settings.

No, those are INTERNATIONAL STANDARD paper sizes. Used everywhere apart
from the archaic USofA.

I misread your post. What I should have asked is "Have you tried duplexing
at TABLOID (11x17) size?"

It is possible that your duplex module may only work on letter- or
legal-sized paper, and not tabloid.

 

[Birk Binnard]

Based on suggestions posted here I did check the Ricoh website and
discovered that there is a recent printer driver update for my printer.
One of the fixes listed in the driver update doc was "failure to
respond to duplex request." I thought this was an odd statement since I
did print duplex successfully from Word (by specifying Duplex in the
printer setup dialog), so when I saw this output I figured the printer
was A-OK.

Well this was a wrong assumption. Installing the new driver software
was a bit of a hassle, but I did manage to get it done. After that I
was able to print the 16 page bulletin successfully on 4 duplex 11x17"
pages. Interestingly enough, the new driver puts up a dialog box just
before duplex printing starts asking if it's OK to proceed with printing
on both sides of the paper. Another little quirk is it's necessary to
re-set all the page setup/duplexing parameters each time the document
prints. It looks like the settings all get reset to default values
after each print operation.

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

If you do not have the latest drivers for your Ricoh, go to here..

http://www.ricoh-usa.com/downloads/...tml/dr_ut_e/rc2/model/x1060_70/x1060_70en.htm