[cups] PPD's-less Postscript Duplex printing

[Smith, Ed]

Greetings,

We have CUPS 1.2.6  in an oracle/solaris/ environment with hundreds of printers, comprised of HP's, Ricohs, and several other manufacturers and lots of ever changing models.
Since our oracle environment only outputs Postscript and PDF, we decided several years ago to go with all raw printing (no PPD's or foomatic), and require all of our printers to have the post script option installed and running.
This has worked out magnificently, and greatly reduced management of the entire system.  (we do have some text for labels, which uses  printer string command codes or a windows/Bartender solution, no need to go into that here).

Recently, a business need for duplex printing in this environment has arisen. I have zero intention of introducing any PPD's. My question- where is the best opportunity to introduce a duplex command code in our environment's print event stream? I am thinking the developers need to get this into the report somehow in the oracle report creation step so the post script code is in the report's header similar to this:

<</Duplex true>> setpagedevice

and at the start of the page where duplexing is to be stopped (if any), use this command:
<</Duplex false>> setpagedevice

Or possibly this sort of thing:

> ,----
> | featurebegin{
> | %%BeginFeature: *Duplex DuplexTumble
> | <</Duplex true /Tumble true>> setpagedevice
> | %%EndFeature
> | }featurecleanup
> `----
But is my strategy sound? There won't be a PPD in the stream, and I am assuming the cups option "sides" will have no impact.
Also I'll mention- we are migrating our Oracle to RHEL 5 using CUPS 1.3.7, in case there other options in the newer release.

Thanks!

Ed J Smith
Network/Linux/Unix support
Daikin Applied
US Central Time
ed.smith at daikinapplied.com<mailto:ed.smith at daikinapplied.com> | www.DaikinApplied.com