Printing 2up double sided from a non-duplex printer

As promised, here is the recipe.

First. Three caveats.
1. Your printer needs to deliver face down after printing on the top
face of the sheets in the input tray. This is normal for mid-price
printers.
2. You need OS X 10.3.x aka Panther and its vastly improved "Preview"
program and new print options.
3. This method is suitable for perfect binding or wire-o binding. It is
no good for folded or stitched binding. For that, you need a proper
imposition program. I have never seen a free one. I am teaching myself
objective-C and Cocoa programming. Maybe, if the printing framework is
simple enough, I'll set myself an exercise. Don't hold your breath.

Here we go

Preparation. (optional)
Set your doc in a template with even and odd headers, mirrored margins
and a small gutter. It is very useful to have page numbers in the
footer, at least while you practice. Make sure it will print in
entirety as a single PDF (Some Section changes split the output PDFs)

Recipe.
1. Print from Word with these settings
Paper handling - even pages only
Output options = print to file - postscript
call the output file something like mydoc evens.ps

2. Print again from Word with these settings
Paper handling - odd pages only
Output options = print to file - postscript
call the output file something like mydoc odds.ps

3. Forget Word now. Open mydoc evens.ps in Preview
Print from Preview with these settings.
Layout - 2 pages per sheet, print order 21
Paper handling - reverse print order

4. Take the paper off the output tray, and without turning it in any
direction or shuffling the paper, put it all back in the input tray.

5. Open mydoc odds.ps in Preview
Print from Preview with these settings.
Layout - 2 pages per sheet, print order 12

6 Guillotine the A4 in half to make two heaps of A5

7 Merge the two heaps page by page, turning one over from each pair.

8 Bind and trim

The sequence of printing the evens in reverse before the odds forward
seems to free you from worry about the number of pages being divisible
by 4 and causes the minimum of hand collating afterward.

Printing as postscript in print from Word stops it trying to outsmart
you, and as a bonus, works around the bug that prints your eps logo art
from the preview bitmap.

If you try this, I'd very much appreciate comments on success or
failure. Beth has asked me to write it up properly for the MVPs site.
I'd rather not look too stupid in front a wider audience. We are all
friends here right?

--
Swen has got to me. I thought I would be the last on earth to mangle my e-mail
address. fsnospam$elliott$$