- Why Is Two Sided Printing Grayed Out Mac
- Greyed Out Or Grayed Out
- Two Sided Printing On Mac Greyed Out
New printers around my organization mean different default settings than what people are used to. On the Mac side, I had to look into saving Presets and changing the default behavior to make people happy. Duplexing (printing on both sides) by default seems like a great way to save paper but many people don’t care for it or it doesn’t work for professional printing. The copiers also have PIN codes on them to track printing by department. Having to enter this PIN at each print can be quite annoying when the copiers cancel any job that doesn’t include a PIN by default.
Solve printing problems on Mac. If you’re having trouble printing, first try these suggestions: If your printer is connected to your Mac, make sure the printer cable is firmly connected, and the printer is plugged into an electrical outlet, and turned on.
- Double sided duplex printing is only availible on “duo” models of Magicard printer, if you have a duo model but this options is still unavailible follow these steps. Update to the latest Driver and Firmware versions via the Drivers & Downloads section Check the LCD screen displays DUO If not Remove dye film and Holokote.
- Two-Sided Printing Greyed Out - HP Support Community - 6857507 #82443 Duplex Printing - Mac OS X #82444 Lexmark United States How to Enable the Duplex Option in the.
To configure the print settings, you start by looking from a print job, not under system preferences. In my example, I opened Safari and went to File, Print… This brings up the quick print screen you see below.
By clicking the down arrow at the end of the printer drop-down, it expands to the full list of options in the print dialog window.
You can see some common printer settings now but a lot more customization is in the bottom drop-down, in this case labeled Safari. Clicking that gives a lot of options to choose from where multiple settings can be configured. The big settings that I have been asked about are printing to only one side instead of both sides by default and including a PIN code with a print job.
To change the 2-sided printing, you’ll find the settings under Printer Features, which will likely be different for each driver. In this case, another drop-down will be listed below and we’ll select Layout. There, we can change Print Type from 2-Sided to 1-Sided.
The next setting for this Konica Minolta is found under Security. I checked the box for Account Track and entered the department’s PIN code. Now to save these two settings that I have configured, I went to the Presets drop-down and chose Save As… (You can’t save over the Standard settings.).
After clicking Save As, a Save Preset As dialog will popup asking you to give the preset a name and whether it should be available on all printers or only this printer.
Now that you have a preset configured with the settings you want, you can choose it from near the top of the print dialog box. Unfortunately, you will have to choose it every time over the Standard settings. If you want a setting to be the new default hold down the Option key when you hit print to set this new preset as the default preset for future print jobs.
In my instance, the preset didn’t quite do the trick for me. Selecting the preset remembered that I only wanted to print one sided and it remembered the PIN code but it didn’t remember the checkbox to use the PIN code.
Why Is Two Sided Printing Grayed Out Mac
To fix that problem, I had to access the Mac’s CUPS web interface. To do that, I used Safari and went to http://localhost:631 On the page that comes up, I clicked on the Printers tab and selected the link to my printer. On the right drop-down, I chose the Set Default Options from the menu.
That took me to an Administration tab. Clicking on the Security link, it gave me roughly the same options I saw through the print dialog interface. I switch the Account Track radio button to On and hit the ‘Set Default Options’ button. This prompted for the Mac’s administrator account and password. Upon entering the credentials, the defaults were updated.
Now, when the user goes to print, the dialog defaults to the 1-sided preset that I created and the Account Track checkbox is checked by default. Everything is now working how they want it.
If it was only a matter of wanting to print 1-Sided instead of 2-Sided, I could skip the Presets step altogether and jump into CUPS. From there, I can configure the printer under the Layout tab and set the default to be single sided printing as the default option and this would affect the Standard preset that was previously available in the account.
Two-sided printing is turned on by default on Mac for supported printers. This means all your print jobs can end up being printed on two-sides, in case you forget to turn off two-sided printing on your Mac.
Disable Two-Sided Printing on Mac
As mentioned above, the default behaviour in macOS is to automatically turn on two-sided printing in case a printer that supports Duplex Mode is connected to a Mac.
However, not every document is suitable for two-sided printing. In-fact, most day to day use documents like school/college essays, homework submissions, resumes, air tickets and many other documents are mostly required to be printed on a single side.
While it is easy to turn off “Two-Sided” option before printing documents, many users forget this and end up having their documents printed on both sides of the paper, which is not what they wanted.
Hence, you are better off disabling two-sided printing on Mac, in order to prevent the possibility of paper, toner and your time being wasted by having to print the documents twice.
In order to disable two-sided printing on Mac, you will have to first enable CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) Browser Interface on Mac. Once you are able to access CUPS, you will be able to make the required changes to disable two-sided printing on your Mac.
Enable CUPS Browser Interface
As mentioned above the print setup on Mac is based on CUPS, an open source modular printing system developed by Apple for Unix based systems. CUPS interface is disabled by default in macOS.
Follow the steps below to enable CUPS browser interface on your Mac.
1. Make sure that you are logged into your Admin Account on Mac.
2. Click on the Finder Icon located in the Task-bar of your Mac (See image below).
3. In the Finder Window, first click on Applications in the side-menu and then scroll down and click on the Utilities Folder (See image below)
4. In the Utilities Folder, click on Terminal.app (See image below).
5. In the Terminal Window, Enter the command sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes and hit the enter key on the keyboard of your Mac
Once this command is successfully executed, you will be able to access CUPS using any browser on your Mac.
Steps to Disable Two-sided Printing on Mac
After enabling CUPS interface on Mac, follow the steps below to access CUPS Settings page and disable two-sided printing on your Mac.
1. Open Safari browser on your Mac.
2. Go to http://localhost:631 – This will take you to CUPS Settings Page.
Note: Although you are accessing the CUPS Settings page via a browser, the page itself is not online. Whatever you are seeing is located right on your computer.
3. When prompted, enter the Username and Password that you normally use to login to your Mac.
4. On the CUPS settings page, click on the Printers tab in the top menu bar (See image below).
5. You will see a list of printers. Click on the Printer for which you want to change the print settings.
6. On the printer’s configuration page. Click on the down-arrow next to “Administration” and then click on Set Default Options in the drop-down menu (See image below).
7. On the next screen, first click on Administration Tab, next click on Printing and then set Duplex Printing Mode to OFF position (See image below).
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For some printers the Duplex Printing Mode option is located under General Settings (See image below)
Two Sided Printing On Mac Greyed Out
8. Next, Click on the Set Default Options button to save your changes.
Now, close the browser and try to print any document. You will see that two-sided printing option is no longer enabled by default on your Mac.
From now, you will no longer go through those frustrating episodes of having to discard two-sided print jobs and printing them again. Also, you will still be able to print on two sides, in case you want to.