35228 - Ability to print all odd/even pages

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Printing: Output, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Sebastian Späth]

What I really miss in NS is the ability to print out all odd/even pages.
Not everyone has a duplex printer.
Would that have to be different handled in Win/Mac/Uninx?

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Do we also need "in reverse order" along with "odd/even" in order to quickly
print a document on both sides of a packet?  Or do all printers take paper in
the same way they spit it out?

Would it also require not using the native print dialog?

Comment 2

[dcone (gone)]

We need a UI inorder to do this.  I could get this going.. but the print dialogs 
need to notify printing.  Giving to Don Melton to handle this aspect.  When the 
UI is setup to specify this.. I can put in the support.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

This seems like something that should be done by a separate program between the 
browser and the printer, because this would be useful in most applications use 
the printer.  I'd say the same thing about print preview, though, so maybe I'm 
just crazy.

Comment 4

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment.
thanks,
	Vishy

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 59058 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 24523 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Alex Stewart]

Copying helpwanted keyword from duplicate bug 59058.

Comment 8

[shrirang khanzode]

spam : changing qa to sujay (new qa contact for Printing)

Comment 9

[xyzzy]

Is there any CSS style for this, and should there be?

Comment 10

[Jesse Ruderman]

Shouldn't this functionality be part of the OS or printer software?  It seems 
silly for each app to do it...

Comment 11

[Blake Ross]

Reassigning to a real person.

Comment 12

[Oleg Sidletskiy]

*** Bug 221683 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[MechCommanderRei]

Stating the obvious just in case, note that the function ought to work for
specially selected page ranges (ex. pgs 4-9) as well as for a whole document. 
Hope this function goes in :)

Comment 14

[William Bumgarner [:zsinj]]

*** Bug 265802 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 310540 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Akkana Peck]

Jesse asked (years ago) whether odd/even printing shouldn't be handled by another app. There are lots of ways to print that way in the OS, at least in Linux.

But in firefox, at least, there's no way (through the UI) to modify the print function to pass a duplex or page argument to the printing system, and there's no way I can find (even by editing prefs.js) to add other virtual printers that set the cups arguments page-set=odd or page-set=even.

Comment 17

[Steve Garcia]

It *was* working with Firefox 1.0.x.

With Firefox 1.0.x, the printer properties dialog was fairly crude. You
couldn't set many options, but one thing you could do was type any command line
arguments into a box and get pretty much any print-time option you knew the
command flag for.

Under Firefox 1.5 printer properities dialog is a lot cleaner -- and a lot
barer. I can now choose paper size, margins, and between grayscale and color.
That's it. No command line box, no stretch, no tray selection. If I want to use
duplex printing, for example, I'm out of luck. 

It's probably a lot to ask to request that the print dialog box have provision
for every possible option that a printer might have (as a Windows dialog might
have, or OpenOffice, or Acrobat or...)

But that's ok.  If we can just have the command line box back, you can take
your time getting us printer specific options.

Please?

Comment 18

[Edward Z. Yang]

Just a little note, I recently discovered a quite pleasing feature in my HL-1440 Laser Printer. Print > Properties > Advanced > Duplex and voila. The print driver handles the even/odd page printing for itself, even though it doesn't have an actual duplex module. I suspect that other printers have similar features.

Comment 19

[R.N. (Roger) Folsom]

My own inkjet printer, an HP Deskjet 1200C which uses the LaserJet 4 command set (customized for color) and PCL5, does NOT have a duplex setting, as nearly as I can determine.  In the early 1990s, this printer was very "high end" --- my recollection is that its list price exceeded $2,000, and that I bought mine on an academic discount for about $1200.

So I'm not sure that most recent printers, given that they are much less expensive, have a Duplex printing setting. 

In any case, my view is that Firefox and SeaMonkey (the latter being what I am using) do need an odd-or-even page setting.  Adobe Reader, WordPerfect, and MS Word all have it.

Without it, I must issue a series of single page print commands for page 1, 3, 5, 7, etc., and then and then issue a series of commands to print page 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

Especially for long documents (such as some newsletters I receive), it would be a major convenience to be able to print all of the odd pages with one command, and then to print all of the even pages with one command.

Comment 20

[Kenneth Herron]

This was fixed by the patch for bug 193001, which includes options for duplex and odd/even printing.

Comment 21

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

That's swell that this bug is fixed for Linux, but it sure isn't fixed for Windows...

Comment 23

[ametedinov]

"""I found a way to print even only / odd only pages on any OS """""


Go to the about:config and filter for print. Find the options for the particular printer you want to use (if you have several, like I do) and then look for the name that ends on "evenpages" and for the one that ends on "oddpages". Currently they both are set to "true" but if you, for instance, set the "oddpages" one to false, only the even pages would print; and vice versa

********************************************************************************

Comment 24

[Antonin LOUBIERE]

Attachment: Bug 35228 - Ability to print even/odd pages. r=emilio

Ability to print all even pages or all odd pages.

Comment 25

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/e0580159ca5c
Ability to print even/odd pages. r=emilio,fluent-reviewers,mstriemer

Comment 26

[Marian-Vasile Laza]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/e0580159ca5c

Comment 27

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Should that be mentioned in release notes?

Comment 28

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

(In reply to Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (back January 4) from comment #27)

Should that be mentioned in release notes?

Hard for me to say since I'm not sure how many people would be interested in this. This bug has been open for over 20 years and has fewer than 20 CC's, so I suspect interest will be limited. Still, for people who need it, it's probably very useful. Perhaps add a short line, something like: "When printing, you can now choose to print only the odd/even pages."