Because any time I try to print to it - whether I do it via USB or over my Airport Express - the 'Two-Sided Printing' option is always grayed out! Welcome to Mac-Forums! Join us to comment and to customize your site experience! Members have access to different forum appearance options, and many more functions. Mar 09, 2015 But on the Mac I go to Print Booklet-Print Settings-Setup-Printer Choose Layout and the Duplex option is Greyed out. Since I'm building the book product on my Mac, I need to be able to do the whole workflow from the Mac. I'm in InDesign CC on both machines and printing to an HP Color Laserjet 5550 PCL 5. This seems like maybe a driver.
Mac Word 2-sided Printing: a reader asks…My printer prints 2-sided (auto-duplex), and most of the things I print give me the option to do so. When I print a Word document I’ve created on my Macbook Pro, it does not and it always comes out 1-sided. Some pre-print windows in other programs on my Mac have a button that says “printer” which you can use to get 2-sided. The Word documents do not. Can you help?
Microsoft Word for Mac operates a bit differently than it does on the Windows computer platform. I think it’s unnecessarily obtuse, and double-sided printing in Word (or any MS Office type of file) should be straightforward and on the main print dialogue box. But that’s just me. The software engineers at Microsoft apparently think it’s ok to bury the 2-sided printing option down in the weeds of print/printer settings. Here’s what you have to do. With your Word document open:
- Click File > Print, or Command P. That opens up the main print window with the document ready to print.
- Click open the 3rd item, Copies & Pages, then click the Layout menu item.
- Click open the Two-sided menu box and choose “Long-edge binding” (this flips the page on the long edge)
Then click the blue Print button. Your document will print out double-sided. Unfortunately, this change isn’t saved to the document, every time you want to print something you have to do this stupid 3-step operation. There is a way to cut it down just a tad though, by creating a preset option. What you do is complete steps 1-3 above, but then click the Cancel button instead of the Print button. That takes you back to the main print window.
At this point, click open the 2nd item “Presets” and choose the option “Save Current Settings as Preset…”. You’ll be prompted to name this new custom preset, I’d suggest you name it “2-sided printing”.
From this point on, when you want to print a document double-sided, follow this 2-step process instead of the 3-step process above:
- Click File > Print, or Command P. That opens up the main print window with the document ready to print.
- Click open the 2nd item, Presets, then click the 2-sided printing option (you created above).
Then click the blue Print button. Your document will print out double-sided.
If you happen to print double-sided almost all the time, you’ll save even more clicks by unchecking a box in the “Show Presets” dialogue box. That’s the one that says “Reset Presets Menu to “Default Settings” After Printing”. Then print something using the 2-step process above. The next time you want to print a document, it’ll remember the last preset you used (2-sided printing) and use that, which saves you from having to do anything but click the blue Print button. This works across documents, so you only have to remember to change the Preset if you don’t want double-sided printing. And remember to change it back next time you print something (and want it double-sided).Sometimes, you get a new printer with a duplex feature, and your Mac, for whatever reason, decides that it should print on both sides of the page by default. (I think this is a problem with the HP printer driver installer, actually.)
Fixing this is doable, but…not obvious. At all. Here’s what you do:
- In the Finder, click the “Go” menu (four over from the Apple menu)
- Choose Utilities
- In there, open Terminal
- At the prompt, type “sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes” and press return (without the quotes)
- Type your computer password (you won’t see it as you type) and press return
- Terminal should simply respond with a prompt like the first prompt, and nothing else. Quit Terminal.
- In Safari or another browser, go to http://localhost:631
- You should see a screen titled “CUPS”. Click the “Printers” tab. (If you get asked for a password, use your computer user’s short user name, and your usual computer password. If you don’t have the short user name, see this Apple Support article.)
- Click your printer in the “Queue Name” column
- In the rightmost of the two dropdowns, choose “Set Default Options”
- I don’t know exactly what options you’ll see next, but one of them should pertain to 2-sided printing. Set it to “Off”.
- Click the “Set Default Options” button.
- You’re done; you can close the browser window.
H/T to the helpful people in this Apple Support thread.
Photo by tom_bullock, courtesy Flickr Creative Commons.