Duplex prints blank pages at section breaks in MS Word

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Level 1

8 points

Duplex prints blank pages at section breaks in MS Word

Symptom: MS Word prints blanks on the backs of only some pages that should be auto-duplexed, resulting in even pages being printed on odd sides of paper sheets. Probability of problem is greater if one side is portrait and the other landscape.

Cause: MS Word creates a separate PostScript file for each section. (A section is delimited by a section break.) As each file arrives at the printer, the printer treats it as a new print job and so ejects the previous piece of paper before printing the first page of the next section. If the last page of a section is odd, then the first page of the next section can't print on the back of that piece of paper.

Microsoft told me it's the fault of the Mac OS. Anybody have insights? Has Apple even acknowledged this problem?

Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 9:09 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 11, 2006 11:26 AM in response to Bay Area Tom

What kind of section break are you using? Does the blank page appear when you do a Preview? Or in the Print Dialog box?

In regard to the portrait vs landscape issue: it is a known problem that Apple can't handle files with mixed orientations - it creates a separate job for each orientation.

Not sure if any of this helps.

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Answer 2

Bay Area Tom Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 11, 2006 8:50 PM in response to John Blanchard1

Next Page section break with different page orientations in the two sections (first section on odd page, next section on even page), is guaranteed to cause the problem.

But Next Page section break even with the same page orientation also causes the problem, though not 100% of the time. I've not figured out why on rare occasions it does not cause the problem. I've examined the usual suspects--anything requiring the second section to appear on an odd page.

Even a regular Page Break (not a section break) causes the problem at least most of the time, even though (by definition) there is no page orientation change.

This is a big problem for me, because I produce 300-page formally structured documents that really benefit from section breaks. I can't expect my readers to manually duplex.

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Answer 3

Oct 12, 2006 10:41 AM in response to Bay Area Tom

You can assemble the various PDF files into a single file using other applications. If you want it to be printed in a certain fashion, a page layout application, such as Indesign or Quark, is really what you should be using for a document of this sort. But you can also use any of several tools for combining PDFs. I use the freeware PDFLab.

Combining orientations is not a trivial exercise, particularly when you are duplexing. You need to specify which way to orient one page with respect to the other, taking into account for the side you want the binding to be on.

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