Big Sur: How to select paper source when printing?

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Big Sur: How to select paper source when printing?

We use a type of mailing label that needs to be printed from the rear tray on our small laserprinter. However, since we started using our new M1 MacBook Pros, no-one has been able to find a working option to select which tray the printer uses for these, which are printed from documents in PDF format.

The usual print option Show Presets is present, and it contains the usual list: Copies & Pages, Media & Quality, Layout, Paper Handling, Cover Page, and Watermark.

The Media & Quality menu contains the options we need to be able to change: Media Feed and Media Type. However, neither of them can now be changed from Auto Select, which obviously means the printer uses paper from the main tray.

Has anyone found a way to change this, please? We don't send a lot of mail this way, but having to print 15 - 20 prepaid postage labels a day onto plain paper and then cut them out and stick them on with tape is an absurd waste of time!

Thank you.

Posted on Dec 21, 2021 11:14 AM

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Answer 1

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Tesserax

Level 10

148,697 points

Dec 21, 2021 12:26 PM in response to iKittyp

Hmm, not sure if this is a macOS Big Sur or M1 issue at this point.

Here's a few things you can try. I suggest doing these on only one of your M1 Macs:

Take a look at this article: Reset Your Mac's Printing System to Fix OS X Printer Problems - Lifewire
Enabling CUPS Printer Interface for Mac - vend

Try the steps in the first article and report back your results. Hopefully, this will do the trick.

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Answer 2

iKittyp Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 21, 2021 12:14 PM in response to Tesserax

Yes, we did.

We downloaded the printer (dated Nov 2020) and scanner (dated Jan 2021) software from the Epson site, they are the most recent versions we could find, and they appear to run fine on the M1 MacBook Pros.

Printer is an Epson Workforce Pro WP-4535, which works perfectly except for this one issue.

Thank you for reading!

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Answer 3

iKittyp Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 21, 2021 1:05 PM in response to Tesserax

Thank you.

The first option repeated something we've already tried, and had no effect.

The second was interesting. Once I was into the CUPS settings, the only available option that looked potentially useful was changing the default print tray to Rear. It isn't what I actually wanted to do, as we mostly print from the main tray, but I thought I'd see what happened...

...which was that the default tray wasn't changed to Rear, but the option to change it from the Print dialogue is now available. Ta da!

Thanks so much for your help. I wouldn't have worked that out even if you gave me 50 years to work on it!

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Answer 4

Tesserax

Level 10

148,697 points

Dec 21, 2021 1:08 PM in response to iKittyp

iKittyp wrote:

Thanks so much for your help. I wouldn't have worked that out even if you gave me 50 years to work on it!

Excellent! I'm glad that worked out for you ... especially as I don't think I'll be around in 50 years to think of something else to try either. ;)

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Answer 5

Tesserax

Level 10

148,697 points

Dec 21, 2021 11:51 AM in response to iKittyp

Did you visit the printer manufacturer's support page to verify that your M1 Macs are running their latest print driver for macOS Big Sur? Which exact make & model is this printer?

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Answer 6

iKittyp Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 21, 2021 1:16 PM in response to Tesserax

You and me neither!!

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Big Sur: How to select paper source when printing?

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