[cups.development] Enhancement? Relative rotation of pages

[Michael R Sweet]

Carl G. Ponder wrote:
> 
> I have a single-sided printer, and am trying to configure two print 
> queues for double-sided printing: one that prints the even pages, after 
> which I move the sheets down to the manual feed, and print the same job 
> to the queue for the odd pages.
> 
> One problem is that the sheets need to be rotated 180 degrees to make 
> this work. The sheets are already facing the right direction to print on 
> the back. I'd like to have the first queue automatically rotate the 
> sheets 180 degrees so the sheets only have to be moved and you don't 
> have to remember to rotate them.
> 
> Note that the form
> 
>    -o orientation-requested=6       # Reverse portrait or upside-down 
> orientation (180 degrees)|
> 
> isn't what I want: if the sheets have already been rotated 90 degrees 
> for landscape orientation, then this will override the 90 degrees, and 
> the sheets will print out portrait instead of landscape.
> 
> The only way I see with the given flags is to define "portrait" versus 
> "landscape" queues that hardcode all the rotations (180 versus 270), 
> which is otherwise unnecessary since the tools I print from (Mozilla, 
> OpenOffice etc.) all have portrait/landscape print options and I don't 
> have to use kludge-queues for rotation the way I do with double-sided 
> printing.
> 
> What I would really like, is to have a flag that adds an additional 180 
> degrees to the rotation that's already there. So if it's already 
> "portrait", it will print with 180 degrees rotation, and if it's already 
> "landscape", it prints with 270 degrees rotation. Or, alternately, the 
> orientation flags could be additive rather than overriding each other. I 
> can't think of any cases where I would actually want my print-queue to 
> ignore the rotation settings I make when I print.

This is probably never going to get added to CUPS, however I would
instead look at either a) putting the paper back in the printer
rotated 180 degrees or b) using a pseudo printer queue that submits
the job to print the even-numbered pages, displays UI via some sort
of RPC mechanism, and then submits the job again to print the odd-
numbered pages.  In the case of the pseudo-queue, you can examine the
job options and update the orientation-requested value accordingly.
(However I think "a" is by far the easiest approach...)

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Michael R Sweet                        Senior Printing System Engineer