When people talk about "duplexing" documents, they mean printing on both sides of the paper. Many printers these days include the ability to print on both sides of the paper, without the need for manually feeding the paper through the printer twice. With most of these printers, you can turn the duplexing capability on by displaying the Print dialog box, and then clicking the Properties button. This gives you access to the settings in the printer driver, one of which invariably controls duplexing.
What if you want the duplexing to always be on for a particular document? What if you want a particular document to always be printed duplex, and never single-sided? There is no setting in Word to do this, but with some printers you can send special codes to the printer that switch it to duplex mode.
For example, let's say that you have a printer capable of printing duplex copies, and that the printer understands the PCL language. You could embed a field in the document that will switch the printer to duplex mode. Follow these steps:
The PRINT field sends characters directly to the printer, bypassing the normal slicing and dicing that Word does with characters. When you perform step 3, the field "disappears" because it doesn't display any result in the document itself. However, if the field is at the very beginning of the document—perhaps in the header for the first page—then it will switch on duplex mode in the printer and your output will be printed as you want it.
You can find detailed information on how you use the PRINT field—particularly with PCL printers—in the following Knowledge Base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/135569
Even though the Knowledge Base article indicates that the article is "retired," it still works with versions of Word up through Word 2003 just fine.
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2018-03-07 15:17:55
Brianna
When I use this syntax (Print 27"&l1S") the page that prints on the backside of my paper prints upside down. It's as though it's printing "open to the Top" setting rather than "open to the Left", as I would like it to. Is there any way to remedy this?
2017-03-07 08:25:47
Richard Cooney Jr
Hi I have a Nuvera 120 printer that is PS. When send this command in a word doc, it hangs the printer. Wondering if there is anything else that might work? Please let me know. Thanks
Rich Cooney
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