Bad Design

I went against my environmental concience this morning and decided to print out a manual. That said, I didn't want to waste too much paper, so I gave a shot at minimizing paper usage. I figured I would print 2 pages per printed page, and I would print double sided. Not bad, cut the page count down by 4.

So, I went to the print settings dialog and found this for page ordering to help you do front and back printing (i.e. print all of the odd pages, flip the paper and print the even pages):

And then I found this to add multiple pages per sheet of paper:

And herin lies the bad design, its subtle... they dont work together!

Stop and think for a second. What you get when you print with 2 pages per sheet and "odd" pages is really this:

But since the odd page numbering doesn't know you are also printing double page per sheet... you get this.

Entirely useless! This is a prime example of a use case that simply wasn't thought out (or worse ignored). So, just pay attention and make sure your app doesn't do stupid stuff like this!