Printing on Both Sidesof My Epson R200

I often forget how to print on both sides of
the paper. I'm writing down the steps here
as much for my memory as for anyone else's.

Here are the steps I use:

1. Control-P to print (in most applications)
2. Look for the print dialog to appear
3. Checkmark Print on both sides of the paper
4. Choose the Flip on short edge radio button
5. Load as many sheets in the printer as needed
6. Click print
7. Let the paper pile up as it comes out of the printer
8. The pile of paper before you is printed on one side
   of the paper but not the other side
9. Hold in your hands the pile of paper oriented so that
   you can read the first page from top to bottom. In other
   words, orient the pile of printed paper the way a person
   normally does when reading.
10. Flip the paper in such a way as to feed the blank
    side of the pile of paper with the top of the flip side
    going into the printer first. In other words feed the
    printer from the top of the pages but flipped over.
11. By now, a resume dialog has appeared
12. Click resume after feeding the printer the
    flip side of the pile of paper
13. The flip side of the pile now starts printing

These steps are for printing an Adobe Acrobat Reader document
(PDF) with 8-1/2 by 11 paper (standard paper). It's probably
pretty similar in other software applications.

The directions are for flipping the paper on the short side.
I find flipping the paper on the short side more intuitive
because I'm consistently feeding the printer the top of the
page first, regardless of which side I'm printing.

I've never tried flipping the long side. I would imagine
flipping the long side means you feed the second side
of the pile of paper the bottom first. In a way, this
makes sense as you are feeding back to the printer what
it just gave you by feeding it the other end of the pile
of paper.

I think of short-side flipping as other side flipping
and long-side flipping as other end flipping.

Another way to look at it that is probably even clearer
is short-side flipping is left-to-right flipping
whereas long-side flipping is end-to-end flipping.

In terms of reading the page, short-side flipping is
left-to-right flipping. Long-side flipping in
terms of how you read the page is end-over-end flipping.

A final thought: However, you flip the paper, you let the
paper pile up naturally. There's no need to worry about
what order the pages come out of the printer. The printer
takes care of that.

Page order is not your issue. Your only issue is flipping
the pile while, at the same time, leaving it in the same order
that it comes out of the printer in.

The miracle of natural order is it is self-correcting:

The first time the printer spits the pile of paper out,
the pile is in reverse order and the last page appears
first.

Then the reverse order self-corrects:

When you feed the pile of paper to the printer a second
time, it reverses the paper again, thus correcting the
order. This is a case of two wrongs making a right.

Because the printer puts the paper in the wrong order twice,
it ends up being in the right order. Make sense?

Paper that is put in reverse order twice is in the right
order. That's it in a nutshell. The one cancels the other.

What do you do to make this work? Absolutely nothing.
Just let the printer spit out the paper in whatever order
it wants to and feed it back to the printer in that same
unaltered order and it all comes out OK.

On my printer, regardless of whether I use short-side flipping
or long-side flipping, the obverse side of the stack (the first
side) comes out in reverse page order. After I flip the paper to
the reverse side of the stack (the second side), the pages start
coming out in normal page order.

Hope this helps.

Update: April 2, 2013

No wonder I'm confused by long side verus short side flipping. Upon closer examination, I see there seems to be a bug in the software relationship between my Epson R200 and Adobe Reader.

The bug is this:

If you choose long side flipping, which is the default, you have to feed the paper back into the printer, bottom-of-the-page first. In doing this, you are flipping the paper twice.

You are flipping the paper twice because you are flipping both the short side and the long side. You flip the short side to get the blank side of the paper. You flip the long side to feed the paper from the bottom of the printed side first.

The resume dialog tells you differently:

If you follow the schematic of the resume dialog, after choosing long-side flipping, you would only flip on the short side. This is wrong! It is clearly wrong based on the result I get.

The takeaway? Forget long side flipping on the Epson R200. Use short side flipping only.

If you use long side flipping, you are flipping the paper 180 degrees twice. If you use short side flipping, you are flipping the paper 180 degrees only once.

When I say flip 180 degrees twice, I mean you flip from side to side and then from top to bottom. In other words, you are flipping two different edges, the long edge and the short edge.

It's very confusing, isn't it? The way to get a correct result is to choose short-side flipping only and to flip on the short edge only. If you do this, you are feeding the paper to the printer from the top of the page on both the obverse and reverse side. To me, this is much more consistent.

Ed Abbott