IOS – Manual double-sided printing on iOS

AirPrint isn't likely to help you here. It's a basically a local network only technology, because of how it functions, it's very unlikely that you could get it working over an iOS device's 3G connection. The only way I could see it working is with a VPN, but I'm not aware of any solutions that can pipe AirPrint over a VPN.

What I would suggest (in rough form) is using email or Dropbox to send documents to be printed remotely. Pretty much any document you can access on iOS can be sent via email or Dropbox.

The basic idea is a computer running in your office that monitors an email address and/or a Dropbox folder, and automatically prints email attachments or files in the Dropbox folder. How you go about this depends on what software you're running on that computer, but on a Mac, you could print email attachments using Mail.app's rules filtering and some AppleScript, or files in Dropbox using a Folder Action.

I think I have a solution to this problem.

After upgrading to Mavericks my saved presets for a Brother Laser printer still worked fine, but for an Epson Inkjet they would load, like you describe. I thought it was the printer or OS conflict as the Epson was attached by USB to a machine running OS X 10.6 and I was sharing to the Mavericks machine. However I got a new wireless Epson Inkjet and the problem persisted.

Here's what I did to fix it.

1. Log in to an administrator account. Make a new one if you need to and give it full privileges.
2. Open an app that lets you print, Safari say.
3. Type Cmd-P and select the problem printer, set your options and save the preset.
4. Click Print, just to make sure it's working.
5. Type Cmd-P and check that your settings have stuck, if they haven't try again with another user account, if they have carry on.
6. Quit the App you used above.
7. In the Finder Opt-Click the Go menu and select Library.
8. Navigate to Preferences.
9. Copy the file com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.[yourprintername].plist to the Desktop.
10. Change the owner of the file to the account that is having problems (chown [username] com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.[yourprintername].plist) if this fails precede the command with sudo.
11. Copy the file from the Desktop to the Drop Box of the user having problems (/Users/[username]/Public/Drop Box, or you could email it to yourself or use Dropbox (as in the cloud service).
12. Log out of the admin account and back in to your usual one.
13. Repeat step 7 and 8 above
14. Delete the com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.[yourprintername].plist
15. Copy your new com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.[yourprintername].plist from your Drop Box folder.
16. Select the new file and type Cmd-I. Scroll down to the bottom of the Get Info window and check that your current username is the one listed with Read/Write access.
17. Log out
18. Log back in
19. Try to print something. Hopefully you will now have a working preset.

Hope this is useful