Getting Duplex printing to work on a Mac

We have a Dell multifunction laser printer (Dell MFP1815DN) with duplex printing. I recently had some trouble getting the duplex option to work. This post describes the simple fix to enable the duplex printing option in OS X Leopard. This fix may likely work for other printers that have similar symptoms.

Although the printer is capable of duplex printing, all the Leopard printing dialogues have the duplex printing options grayed out. The trick is to send a print job from the command line with an option to force two sided printing. Once that is done, the normal print dialogue duplex options will be enabled

First, make sure you have a current print driver. This fix won't work if you are using the generic postscript driver. OS X is quite good about automatically discovering and setting up printers on your network. In my case, it found my Dell printer and set it up with the generic Postscript driver automatically, and except for 2-sided printing, it worked fine. However, to fix the duplex issue I had to get the specific Dell driver.

You can get the driver for this particular printer from the Dell Website driver page, or you can download the file directly.  The latter option may be easier as the Dell driver page can sometimes be confusing to users. After downloading the package, unzip the file and run the installer. The installer is simple and just puts the driver on your system; you will need to select the driver from the preferences pane to enable it.

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• Go into your preferences pane and choose the Print & Fax option
• Locate and choose your printer on the left and then click on the Options & Supplies button.
• Choose the driver tab.
• From the Print Using dropdown, choose Select a driver to use...
• Select Dell Laser MFP 1815 PS from the driver list
• Hit OK and close your preferences pane

Now, you will need a two page document. You can use any document you have laying around, or you can download this pdf test file. Save this file to your desktop. Now let's do the fix:

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• Open the terminal application. By default this is in Applications-> Utilities
• now go to where your 2 page document is

cd ~/Desktop

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• now issue the following two commands. Alter them if you are using your own document

lpr -o sides=two-sided-long-edge 2PageTest.pdf

lp -o sides=two-sided-long-edge 2PageTest.pdf

Now verify that your printer printed a 2 sided page. If it did, you should now see the duplex options enabled in your normal print dialogues. You may have to restart the individual application before it takes effect.

I hope this trick works for you as well; Leave me a comment if you have any questions or comments.