Problem with duplex printing on HPCLJ 5550dn

Hi There,

I've got a HP colour Laserjet 5550dn printer connected via ethernet. I've installed HPLIP 3.9.12 on my Ubuntu 9.10 box . HPLIP was installed using the shell script downloaded from the hplip website (rather than using apt-get) - installation went smoothly.

The problem is that if the default "Duplex Unit" setting of the printer is set to "installed" all jobs print double sided, regardless of whether the end-user selected a Duplex printing option (long/short edge binding) when they printed a document. In other words, even if a user sets "Duplex" (open-office) or "2-sided" (acrobat reader) to "off" or "ignore" the job will print double sided.

This problem occurs whether or not the default "2-Sided Printing" option for the printer is set to off, long or short-edged binding. I.e. it seems that by setting "Duplex Unit" to "installed" as the default option, there is no way for the user to make some jobs single-sided.

If I set the default "Duplex Unit" setting to "not installed", then all jobs default to single-sided. In this case the user is able to control whether they get a double-sided printout or not. They can do this by editing the properties of that print-job, setting "Duplex Unit" to "installed" and then choosing short or long edged binding in the Duplex print option. However having to set 2 options to get double sided printing is not very intuitive for end-users.

Ideally, I would like to set the printer to default to duplex printing, but allow the user to set single sided printing if/when they need this.

Hope that makes sense.