Duplex Printing Emulation

[Joe]

I have an HP Deskjet (895Cse) attached to a Mandrake 9.1 rc2 system 
(PII, 266MHz) being used as a stand alone desktop system (one user at a 
time - not serving anything) (hpijs driver). I want to emulate duplex 
printing.  The printer does not directly support this in hardware, but 
under Windoze, it is accomplished by printing odd pages reverse, then 
pausing with a dialog box for me to remove, flip, and reinsert the 
paper, then printing even pages forward.  It also knows to print an 
additional blank page at the end to eject the last page if the total 
number of pages is odd.

If Windoze can do it ... certainly Linux can!  But how?

I've already done it manually using xpp (and I see kde-printer has 
similar parameters), but this requires manually printing everything 
twice and setting a bunch of options and is very operator (me) error prone.

I took a look at the xpp source code and very quickly determined that 
modifying it to do what I want or writing my own application to call 
CUPS was way beyond my current skill level.

 From reading the kprinter documentation, it seems like I could write a 
shell script to call kprinter with command line parameters to print my 
file odd, reverse, no interaction and then print it again even, forward, 
and let the display pop up so it would wait for me to do the paper 
gymnastics. This would definitely be a kludge, but it would be a vast 
improvement over how I am doing it now.

However, I could not figure out how to pass the necessary parameters to 
kprinter.  Everything I tried was ignored.

Can someone show me the correct syntax for the kprinter command to do 
this (if it can be done)?

Is there anything I can run from a shell script that will return the 
number of pages in a print job so I can test it for odd and print an 
extra blank page to eject the last odd page?  This would be very nice, 
but I can live without it.

Has anyone come up with a better way to do this?

My proposed kludge will probably work for printing one file at a time, 
but it would almost certainly fail if I tried to queue up more than one 
print job.

As Linux penetrates the desktop market, there should a large number of 
users with inexpensive printers who wouldn't mind saving a few trees, 
some space, and some money by printing on both sides of the paper.  I 
think they would use something like this if it was available as a single 
step procedure.

Thanks.

Joe