I’ll need to mirror print stuff regularly (flip across the vertical axis), and I’m trying to make the process convenient.
The manual way to mirror print would be by invoking lp
, e.g.
lp -o mirror myfile.pdf
Invoking lp would work for images, PDF, ps etc. But but for application (open office draw) files. Unfortunately, I don’t see an obvious way to mirror print within the application itself.
I’m thinking of setting up a mirror printer in CUPS that would automatically apply the -o mirror to any documents that hit it.
I suspect this would require some tinkering with CUPS filters - I’ll dig into it sometime.
I can’t be the only one who’s needed this at some point in time.
Has anyone here done something similar? Looking forward to your thoughts!
Mission Accomplished! My printer driver now has a MirrorPrint Option, and selecting it enables Mirror Printing. For convenience (since I don’t see a client side option to flip mirror printing), I have a doppleganger of my regular printer, and I named it MirrorTest - screenshot below. When I need a mirror print, I just send it to the mirror printer.
Actual Changes
Here’s the relevant excerpt (added) in
/etc/cups/ppd/MirrorTest.ppd
(I added this UI option right below the Toner option). Excerpt adds a MirrorPrint Toggle (boolean) to the printer defaults setup. When enabled - the printer will print in mirror mode.For further convenience (making sure that a new printer installation didn’t mess up my custom changes, I also updated the relevant ppd file in
/usr/share/cups/model/
. Whenever you add a new printer - CUPS will use the corresponding model ppd as a base, and it will apply any settings changes from configuring default to the copied ppd file in/etc/cups/ppd/your_printer.ppd
.Hope this helps if someone else is also looking to do something similar!
Wow, CUPS is way better than I previously thought and I thought it was amazing!
It is certainly useful for some use cases such as network print servers (I have a dedicated lxc container on the network to do this) and custom conversions of pages (during my digging, I learned about companies using a CUPS network printer to watermark every document being printed).
I’m not an expert by any means: it is definitely a useful tool in certain cases, but oh man… the documentation was a bit hard to figure out for me!