Duplex printing is great…except, if I bind the pages together like a book, the left sides of the page are a little too close to allow turning the pages back to read. It seems I ought to be able to tell the printer to make the wide margin on the right for the even-numbered pages, but I can’t figure out exactly how.
I’m working on a brother printer that actually has a pretty advanced piece of software to mess with the settings.
Is there a term for this?
There are margin settings in Word that allow this.
Word, LaTeX, etc., have ways to do it. How are you producing your document(s)?
I’ve not come across any printers that do this natively, although I could imagine they’re out there.
Typically these are set in your page layout or word processing app, not in/on the printer itself.
At least in MS Word, the thing you’re looking for is called “gutter”. That’s the increment of extra margin you want on the binding side.
So for example, if you set 1" left margin, 1" right margin & 1/2 inch gutter, then print single-sided, you’d get a 1-1/2" white gap between the paper’s edge & the left edge of the printing, and a 1" gap on the right side.
Gutter is set on the same control as the rest of the margins & paper size, etc.
There is also a settig on the same control called “Mirror margins”. That tells Word you want the gutter to alternate : left side on odd pages, right side on even. There’s even a setting to put the gutter on the top/bottom rather than left/right in case you’re binding something across the top.
Bottom line: Set gutter size, gutter location, and mirror margin & you’re good to go.
I do it this way with a Brother printer:
Printer Settings -> Properties -> Advanced -> Duplex -> Binding Offset