Forgive me if I’m 30 years behind the times. If so, somebody please update my ignorance. //old-rolleyes//
Is this the sort of feature that some printers (perhaps the higher-end ones) would be able to do and others might not? Or is this the sort of stuff that modern systems do in the printer driver code in your computer, then sending the final results as-they-are-to-be-printed to the printer?
I worked for a laser printer company (Imagen, long-since defunct) 1984-1987, an era when laser printers were new-fangled golly-whiz devices. When you responded to personal ads (which were printed in newspapers in those days) via U. S. Mail (which is how it was done in those days), you could always make a slick first impression if you sent a letter printed in near-typeset-quality on a laser printer! (“You only love me for my printer!” Yeah, I really used that line.)
Even then, our own printers could do this, without needing any special drivers in the computer. These were plain-old-DOS days, and all a printer driver really needed to do was send plain-old-plain-text to the printer byte by byte. The printer itself could spool up hundreds of pages, and was capable of printing them in the order received (for printer models that stacked the pages face-down) or reverse the order (for printer models that stacked the pages face-up). It could do double-sided printing on some models – the most efficient way was to print the front sides of a bunch of pages (I think we did 10 or 20), then the back sides of those in reverse order. The printer itself took care of printing them all in the right sequence so the end result came out right.
There was an option to print plain-text at half size (you got two pages printed on one sheet, in half-size text. You held the page in landscape orientation, but the two printed pages on the left and right halves of the page were each in portrait orientation.
And yes, it could print booklets on various paper sizes. It did either quarto or octavo (or both? I forget which), which entailed printing the individual pages, two pages per paper side, both front and back, in some crazy-ass order so you could fold the resulting pages in half to make a booklet. The computer didn’t have to deal with any of this – it just sent the pages of the text in sequential order, and the printer itself took care of printing the pages in whatever crazy-ass order it took to get it right.
So how is that all handled in modern systems? My impression is that printers have gotten dumber and dumber, to the point where all they can do anymore is print bitmaps, and the driver in the computer has to do all the layout and formatting, even to the extent of rasterizing all the text and sending bitmaps to the printer. Some printers still advertise “Does text printing!”
SO: Is the OP asking about printer features that any modern printer actually can do, or is he asking about “printer features” that are actually handled entirely in a modern printer driver?