Duplex printing: "Left/Top" vs "Short side/Long side"

[Shevek]

At some point the duplex drop down menu controls were changed from "short side/long side" to "open to left/open to top".

Can you please change this back to former controls (short side/long side)? Because it's often not clear what the driver believes to be the left or the top so we get it wrong half the time.

[Ranjitha]

Hi Shevek,
Duplex option names are different in different products. But the functionality will be the same

Thanks,
Ranjitha.

[Shevek]

Duplex option names are different in different products. But the functionality will be the same.

Thanks but that totally misses the point of my request. The point being that the way they are now named makes it difficult for the user to determine what is "left" and what is "top" because the user can easily rotate the orientation of the page in the printer dialogue at any time. With "short" and "long" side there is no ambiguity.

And this is nothing to do with "different products". This is to do with the driver, which has clearly been changed from "short side/long side" to "open to left/open to top" at some point.

[Greta_C]

Shevek,

Can you let us know which Fiery model you have? And where did you get the two different drivers? What are the names/versions of the drivers?

As another user noted - there are different naming conventions across different manufacturers. However if you have always used the same Fiery model and just tried an updated driver then this should not change.

[Shevek]

Hi Greta, we're using a Color Controller E-5200 with the Ricoh 4501.

I can't remember what version of driver we were using that used the terms "Short side/Long side" but the version we're using now is E-5200 PS v1.0 on OS X 10.9.1 which uses "Left/Top".

Can this please be changed to "Short side/Long side" in the next version?

[Steve0]

I wonder if a slight edit to the PPD file (a text file) wouldn't fix the problem.

Find the file called "E-5200 PS US V1.0" (if you are in the US) and open it in TextEdit.

In the file, find the string "Open to Left" and replace it with "Long Side". Find the string "Open to Top" and replace it with "Short Side". (There is only one occurrence of each.)

That should presumably change the verbiage that appears in the UI of your driver.

No guarantees, I don't use this driver, but in theory this should work.

[Shevek]

Thanks for the thought Steve.

I edited the following files as suggested and restarted machine, but it didn't work:
Macintosh HD > Printers > PPDs > Contents > Resources > en.lproj > E-5200 PS US V1.0
Macintosh HD > Printers > PPDs > Contents > Resources > en.lproj > E-5200 PS V1.0

[Steve0]

Darn it. Well, we gave it a shot.

[Shevek]

I assume we're ******* in the wind asking for this change then?

The other thing that's very annoying about the Fiery driver is that you have to dig down into the Printer Features menu to activate duplex printing. Most modern drivers provide a native checkbox for this at the very top level of the driver interface, next to the 'number of copies' etc.