The correct way to disable double-sided printing on your Mac

Double-sided printing is enabled by default on your Mac for supported printers. This means that all your print jobs can be printed on both sides, in case you neglect double-sided printing on your Mac.

Disable double-sided printing on Mac

As mentioned above, the default behavior of MacOS is to systematically enable double-sided printing in case a printer that supports duplex mode is connected to a Mac.

However, not all documents are suitable for double-sided printing. In fact, most documents used on a daily basis, such as college essays, homework, resumes, airline tickets, and many other documents, need to be printed on one side only.

Although it is easy to display the “Duplex” option before printing documents, many customers ignore this and end up printing their documents on both sides of the paper, which is not what they intended.

Therefore, it is best to disable double-sided printing on your Mac, to avoid wasting paper, toner and your time printing documents twice.

To try to disable duplex printing on Mac, you must first enable the CUPS (Custom Printing System) browser interface. Unix Widespread) on Mac. Once you are able to get into CUPS, you can make the necessary settings to disable double-sided printing on your Mac.

Enable CUPS browser interface

As mentioned above, the printing setup on the Mac is based on CUPS, an open source modular printing system developed by Apple for Unix-based methods. The CUPS interface is disabled by default on MacOS.

Follow the steps below to enable the CUPS browser interface on your Mac.

1. Don't forget to stay connected to your Administration Account on Mac.

2. Push the button Search Icon located in the activity bar of your Mac (see image below).

3. In the Finder window, first click on Showtimes: in the side menu, then scroll down and click on the Public services File (See image below)

4. In the Utilities folder, click Bus Terminal.app (See image below).

5. In the terminal window, enter the command sudo cupsctl WebInterface=protected and press the enter key on your Mac keyboard

Once this command is successfully executed, you will be able to log into CUPS using any browser on your Mac.

Steps to disable double-sided printing on Mac

Once you have enabled the CUPS interface on your Mac, follow the steps below to access the CUPS configuration web page and disable double-sided printing on your Mac.

1. Open safari on your Mac.

2. Ir a http://localhost:631 – This will take you to the CUPS configuration web page.

Be careful: Although you can access the CUPS configuration web page through a browser, the web page itself is not online. Everything you see is on your laptop.

3. When you are invited to do so, take the Username e Password that you use to log into your Mac.

4. On the CUPS configuration web page, click the button Printing in the top menu bar (see image below).

5. You will see a list of printers. Click the button Printer for which you need to change the print settings.

6. On the printer configuration web page. Click the button Arrow down after “Administration”, then click on Set default options in the drop-down menu (see image below).

7. On the next screen, click first on Administration Tab, then click on Print Then, set the duplex printing mode to OFF (see image below).

On some printers, the duplex printing mode option is located below Basic Settings (See image below)

8. Then click the button Set default options to save many of your settings.

Now close the browser and try to print a document. You will notice that double-sided printing is not enabled by default on your Mac.

Now you won't have those annoying episodes where you have to throw away double-sided print jobs and print them again. Plus, you can always print double-sided, just in case.

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