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An office printer had an option for automatic duplex printing, but not manual.

  1. I commanded it to print firstly all even pages in normal order, and they ended at the paper output tray face-down (p. 2 was at the bottom).

  2. Then I turned them upside down, and placed them back into the paper feeder tray. Now p. 2 faced up and was the top-most sheet. See the images below.

enter image description here 3. I printed all odd pages in normal order. At the paper output tray, the bottom-most sheet contains p. 2 (facing down), p. 1 (facing up; reverse of p. 2). The second bottom-most sheet contains p. 4 (facing down), p. 3. So the front-to-back order is wrong.

How can I rectify this with the printer, rather than wasting my time flipping manually? I was foolish not to read this first.

Source of pictures from left to right: Leftmost, Center, Rightmost.

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  • The page order is correct. The page orientation (flopped) is the issue as I understand your characterization (rightmost image.)
    – Stan
    Jul 28, 2019 at 5:01
  • All you need to illustrate your issue is the stock (labeled) illustration of the pile of paper. The picture of the printers is not really necessary. Showing two different model printers is confusing the explanation. We don't have to know how it happened.
    – Stan
    Jul 29, 2019 at 13:57

2 Answers 2

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To flip the pages over using the printer, run the stack of pages through the printer again without printing an image. The paper feeder will do the chore for you.

Create a blank non-printing page (with a few "white" characters) and make as many faux (blank) copies as you have pages to flip. Since printers cannot print white, the job will pass through the printer unchanged except for the page order being affected.

Run the job printing one-side in normal order.

Good luck.

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  • I don't think it matters whether you run page-shuffle on your pre-printed paper as is or with the paper flipped as the order is altered either way.
    – Stan
    Jul 28, 2019 at 4:57
  • What a brilliant idea, nice one Stan
    – Caius Jard
    Jul 29, 2019 at 7:39
  • My bottom feed printer has this problem, so I will use Stan's great tip. My old top-feed printer gave the proper page order.
    – John Canon
    Sep 18, 2020 at 0:01
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It sounds like you're asking for how to fix your broken printout; you can't - your first odd page is irreversibly now printed on the back of your last even page so it won't ever read right. Dump the lot in the recycling and follow the instructions in the document you linked: print even pages, reverse order then run them back through in odd only, normal order. Make sure you know which way up to place your part printed paper in the tray so the tops of all pages are at the same edge of the paper

I used to duplex occasionally and found it handy to write the instructions (including the face up/face down, top of page to front/back instruction) on the paper tray itself using a sharpie

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  • ' It sounds like you're asking for how to fix your broken printout': My print-out isn't broken? The pages appear on the page correctly, but the order is reversed.
    – user1869
    Jul 29, 2019 at 7:55
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    'It sounds like you're asking for how to fix your broken printout': My print-out isn't broken? The pages appear on the page correctly, but the order is reversed. I edited the picture in my post: please reread?
    – user1869
    Jul 29, 2019 at 8:01
  • OK so what are you actually asking? Why is stan's answer not what you seek?
    – Caius Jard
    Jul 29, 2019 at 8:23

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