If the Printer supports it, your MacBook is likely to default to two-sided printing; which is great from an ecological point of view. However, this can often end up doing the opposite (wasting paper and ink); if your printing requirements are mostly one-sided and you forget to disable or uncheck the two-sided printing option.
Hence, let us go ahead and take a look at different ways to disable Two-sided Printing on a MacBook.
Disable Two-Sided Printing on Mac
If your printing requirements are mixed (One-sided and Two-sided), you can prevent a print job from being printed on both sides of the paper by unchecking the two-sided option; before issuing the print command.
If most of your Print Jobs require you to print on one-side of the page, you can totally rule out the possibility of documents being printed on both sides of the page by disabling two-sided printing; using any of the following methods.
1. Disable Two-Sided Printing Using System Settings
If your MacBook is powered by a newer version of macOS (Sonoma 14.6 and later), the easiest way to disable two-sided printing on a MacBook is by using System Settings (or System Preferences).
1. Click on Apple Logo in the top-menu bar and click on System Settings in the drop-down menu.
2. On the System Settings Screen, select Printers & Scanners in the left-pane and open the tab for your Printer in the right-pane.
3. On the Printer’s screen, click on Options & Supplies…
4. On the next screen, go to Options tab and disable the Duplexer option.
5. Click on OK to save this Setting on your MacBook.
2. Disable Two-Sided Printing By Creating Single-sided Preset
Another way of disabling two-sided printing on a MacBook is by creating a single-sided Preset using the following steps.
1. Open Text or any other type of File on your MacBook.
2. Click on the File tab in the top-menu bar and select the Print option.
3. On the next screen, set the Double-sided setting to OFF position.
4. After this, click on the Drop-down next to Presets and select Save Current Settings as Preset option.
5. On the pop-up, type “Single-Sided” or any other Name for the Preset
6. Click on OK to save the Preset.
3. Disable Two-Sided Printing Using CUPS Interface
The Print setup on a MacBook is based on CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), which is an open source modular printing system developed by Apple for Unix based systems. The “CUPS Interface” can be easily enabled on a MacBook and used to disable two-sided printing.
1. Open the Finder on your MacBook.
2. From the Finder screen, go to Applications > Utilities and open the Terminal.app.
3. On the Terminal screen, type sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes and press the Enter key on the keyboard of your MacBook.
Once this command is executed, you will be able to access the CUPS Interface by using the Safari browser on your Mac.
4. Open the Safari browser on your Mac > type “http://localhost:631/printers” in the Search bar and press the Enter key on the keyboard of your MacBook.
Note: Although you are accessing the CUPS Settings page via Safari browser, the page itself is not online and what you are seeing is located right on your computer.
5. When prompted, enter the Username and Password that you normally use to login to Mac.
6. On the CUPS settings page, click on the Printers tab in the top menu bar.
7. On the Printers page, you will see a list of printers > Select the Printer for which you want to change the print settings.
8. On the printer’s configuration page, click on down-arrow next to “Administration” and select Set Default Options in the drop-down menu.
9. On the next screen, go to Administration > Printing and set Duplex Printing Mode to OFF position.
Note: For some printers the Duplex Printing Mode option is located under General Settings, as you can see in the below screenshot.
10. Make sure you click on Set Default Options button to save the changes.
After this, the Two-sided printing option will no longer be enabled by default on your MacBook.