Printing a Document's Mirror Image

Word does a great job of printing documents. However, for some purposes you might find it useful to print a mirror image of a document—where everything is reversed on the printout, and you can only see it correctly if you look at the document in a mirror. For example, you might need such a mirror image if you are doing silk screening onto tee shirts or coffee mugs with the output you create.

Unfortunately, Word has no intrinsic setting that allows you to create mirrored output. There are ways you can achieve the same results, however. The first thing you should do is to check out the capabilities of your printer driver. Most PostScript printers (and many non-PostScript HP printers) include the capability to mirror the output. The feature is not limited to laser printers, either. Many ink-jet printers include the capability to do mirrored output.

All you need to do is click on the Properties button in the Print dialog box, and then do a little exploring in the various tabs and controls. On my printer, the option is contained in a portion of the dialog box entitled PostScript Options. Yours, obviously, may be in a different place. The feature may have a name such as "mirror output" or "flip horizontal."

If you search high and low and cannot find such an option, there is a tricky low-tech solution you can use. All you need to do is print from Word, like normal, on a piece of overhead transparency film. Then, turn the printed film upside down and copy it on a copier. The result—mirrored output, just like you need.

Finally, if you don't want to mess with the transparencies (it can get a bit expensive if you have many pages to do), you can follow these general steps, instead:

1. Prepare your document as normal.
2. Press Ctrl+A to select the entire document.
3. Press Ctrl+C to copy it to the Clipboard.
4. Switch to a graphics program, such as Paint Shop Pro.
5. Press Ctrl+V to paste the document's image into the program.
6. Using the features of the graphics program, flip the image as desired.
7. Select the entire image and copy it back to the Clipboard.
8. Switch back to Word and paste the graphics object into the document.
9. Print as desired.