Printing two separate, single sheet docs on front and back of page

[Deuxdad]

I have a Canon D420 printer which is capable of printing on both sides of the paper.  It will print side 1, spit it partially out then suck it back in to print side 2.  Is there any way to get both documents to print on one sheet without manually feeding the 1st printout back into the printer so it can print the 2nd doc?  I have looked at all possible settings on the printer and can see no solution, therefore, is there a way to do it with a script of some type?  I have no knowledge of scripts.

TIA,
Deuxdad

[Geek-9pm]

Either nit is or is not a two-sided printer.
Wht is your question?
If it is a two-sided printer, it works as you expect.
You should not have to do anything other the load the paper tray with about 50 sheets of paper.

[Deuxdad]

Two(2).... Separate.... One(1) page.... Documents....

[Geek-9pm]

Join the documents.
If the documents are RTF, you can use Word pad.
Use print prevue  to help you adjust the line breaks in the first page.

[Deuxdad]

My apologies to everyone.  I thought I could simplify the problem by stating it the way I did but that seems to be causing the confusion I hoped to avoid.  Here's the actual problem:  I subscribe to a service which provides me with crossword puzzles.  Once the crossword puzzle is displayed, I have the option to print it, unsolved, on my printer.  If I choose that option it will print a copy of the unsolved puzzle.  There's another option onscreen to print the solved puzzle which will print the puzzle with all the letters filled in.  I like to print about a month's worth of puzzles but it's somewhat time-consuming because I have to first print the unsolved puzzle, take the printout out of the printer and put it back on top of the stack of fresh paper.  That way when I choose to print the solved puzzle, the unsolved printout will be on the other side of the printout.

I need some way to make the printer think it's a two-page print job so it will print both print options (unsolved and solved) on one sheet of paper without me having to re-insert the first printout back into the printer.

Hope that's a little clearer.  Again, TIA.

[Salmon Trout]

Can you download the puzzle and answer files to your computer for printing out later? (E.g. by right clicking a link and choosing Save as... or by going to the File menu of the browser and doing that?) If so, you could (assuming no other method is proposed) try something like this:

Put all the puzzle and answer files in the same folder. Using Windows Explorer...

Easiest if you choose Details or List view, maybe?

Rename or prefix the names of the puzzle and answer document files so they sort puzzle-answer-puzzle-answer e.g.

01 Puzzle 1.doc (or pdf or whatever)
02 Answers 1.doc
03 Puzzle 2.doc
04 Answers 2.doc
05 Puzzle 3.doc
06 Answers 3.doc
(etc)

Sort the files by name so they appear as above.

Hold down the Ctrl key and click each odd numbered file (starting 01, 03, 05 etc) in turn to highlight all the "puzzle" files. Right click any one of them and select "Print". When they are all done take the whole stack out of the printer and compose the stack so that the back of puzzle 1 is on top, followed by the back of puzzle 2, etc. Put the whole lot back in the paper input tray the right way around and now highlight all the even numbered files (starting 02, 04, 06 etc - the answers) and again right click any one and select "print". At least this way you are not having to reverse each sheet at the time of printing it.

Or if you have to do it from the browser you could print out a stack of puzzles and then turn them over and go back and print the answers to those puzzles in order

[Deuxdad]

Thanks Salmon,

That would work.  I have a pseudo-printer (software) which creates a .PDF of anything printable.  I could pseudo-print all the unsolved puzzles and then all the solved puzzles. I also have a utility called PDFSAM (PDF Split And Merge) which would gather all solved and unsolved puzzles into one big PDF which could then be printed on the Canon as you suggested.  But somehow that seems like a lotta work.  The more I think about this the more I think that there's no way to do this other than what you've suggested because really, I need a way to fool the printer into thinking it's going to print a two-page document for each puzzle.  (sigh).

[Geek-9pm]

The program the OP has can be run as a batch process.
In this link somebody is using it in a batch file.
http://www.pdfsam.org/bbforum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1456
Can you concat multiple times from the same batch file?

So there may be some way to do it.

[Deuxdad]

It becomes awkward because every request to print to PDF defaults to the same filename.  I would have to rename the PDF each time I requested a print, keeping track of which printout I was requesting.  In other words, the PDF pseudo-printer generates the filename "FLASH.PDF" each time I tell it to print a puzzle, solved or unsolved. Therefore I would have to change the filename to something different for each puzzle, solved or unsolved before I allowed it to generate the PDF.

This is getting waaay too convoluted simply to relieve me of having to manually re-insert a piece of paper into the printer's supply tray for each puzzle.

But I do appreciate very much all the suggestions.

Thank you.  I will keep checking this thread for a while in case anyone comes up with a ridiculously simple way of doing this.

[Geek-9pm]

I think one of the PDF printers auto increments the file names. So if y0ou entery TODAY.PDF as the name of the file, it will increment the name for following files.
TODAY.PDF      <<-- the first one
TODAY.PDF(1)  <<-- The next one
TODAY.PDF(2)   <<-- The third one
Here is a list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_printer_software
Hope this is of some help.

[Deuxdad]

Thank you Geek.  The link you provided led me to PDF Creator which does exactly what I need it to do.  I temporarily set PDF Creator as my default printer and then print the first unsolved puzzle.  At that point I can tell PDF Creator to go "on hold" until I print the rest of the unsolved and solved puzzles.  After they're all "printed" I tell PDF Creator to combine all the separate puzzles into one PDF file.  Once that's created I just send the file to my Canon printer which proceeds to print the first unsolved puzzle on one side of the paper and the solved puzzle on the obverse.  It continues that way until the entire PDF file is printed.  I end up with a month's worth of puzzles with the unsolved puzzles on one side of the paper and the solved puzzles on the other.

[Geek-9pm]

Glad you got it to work.