Splitting Odd and Even Pages for Double-Sided Printing
How to print double-sided on a printer that can't do it automatically, and how to handle double-sided scans, using a PDF split into odd and even pages.
Many home and office printers can't print on both sides of the paper automatically. And many scanners with a document feeder scan only one side at a time. In both cases, the trick is the same: work with the odd pages and the even pages separately. This guide shows how to do that with the "Smart" mode of Split PDF.
What the Smart mode does
Open Split PDF, choose your document, and in the "Range" tab select the Smart mode. The tool creates two files:
- one with all odd pages: 1, 3, 5, 7...
- one with all even pages: 2, 4, 6, 8...
Both files are downloaded together in a ZIP archive. Pages are copied without any quality loss.
Manual double-sided printing, step by step
- Split the document into odd and even pages with Smart mode and extract the ZIP file.
- Print the odd pages file first. You now have the fronts of every sheet.
- Put the stack back into the printer, turned over so that the blank side will be printed. How exactly depends on your printer; see the tip below.
- Print the even pages file. Each even page lands on the back of the matching odd page.
Tip: find out how your printer feeds paper. Before printing a long document, draw an arrow on one blank sheet, pointing away from you, and put it in the tray with the arrow facing up. Print a single page and look where the text appears relative to the arrow. That tells you which way to put the printed stack back in. Getting this right once saves a lot of wasted paper.
Watch out for odd page counts. If the document has, say, 9 pages, the odd file has 5 pages and the even file 4. The last sheet has no back side; take it out of the stack before printing the even pages, or the backs will shift by one sheet.
Some printers output pages face up, which reverses the order of the stack. If your even pages come out in reverse order relative to the fronts, use the "Reverse order" option in your print dialog for the second pass, if available.
Combining double-sided scans
The reverse problem is common with scanners that have a document feeder but scan one side only. You scan the stack of fronts, turn it over and scan the backs. Now you have two files: one with pages 1, 3, 5... and one with pages 2, 4, 6..., often with the backs in reverse order because the stack was turned over.
To put them back together:
- Open Merge PDF and add the fronts file, then the backs file.
- Drag each back page into place after its front page. For short documents this takes a minute.
- Delete the blank backs of pages that were printed on one side only.
- Download the combined document.
For long documents, it is often faster to scan the backs in reverse order on purpose (turn the stack so that the last sheet is scanned first) so that page numbers line up naturally.
Other uses for odd and even pages
- Booklets and brochures: layouts that are designed in spreads sometimes put left pages on even numbers and right pages on odd numbers. Splitting lets you review or print each side separately.
- Bilingual documents: some translations alternate pages, with the original on odd pages and the translation on even pages. Smart mode separates the two languages into two files.
- Removing blank backs: if a document was scanned double-sided but only the fronts have content, the odd pages file is exactly the document you want.
Privacy
Splitting runs entirely in your browser. Your document is not uploaded, which is important when you are printing contracts, exam papers or other confidential material on a shared printer.