Officejet Pro 8720 not printing duplex

[Thevelone]

I am having the same problem.  Just purchased an Officejet 8720 and cannot get it to duplex.  

I am running macOS Sierra 10.12.4.  I do not have a Print & Fax...I do have a Printers & Scanners however.  I can open the print queue and then I have a Pause and Settings buttons.  I don't see Printer Setup anywhere.  

If I click on Settings button, on the General tab I see the Driver Version is 4.3.0.  I have no ability to click on it.  

The options tab shows a checkbox for an Optional Paper Input Tray.

Supply Levels tab just shows the ink levels.

Utility tab shows a button to Open Printer Utility.  I can get into the printer utility but again don't see any options for duplex.

I have been successful in printing duplex from TextEdit so pretty sure this is just another problem with Office for MAC in that Word doesn't work properly.   Any workarounds out there?

[sandytechy20 · Accepted solution]

@Thevelone

Welcome to the HP Forums. I would be happy to help you with your HP Officejet pro 8720 printer. I understand that you want to print on both sides and you have already done some preliminary troubleshooting. 

• Open the document that you want to print, click File, then click Print.
• If no settings display, click Show Details.
• Select the name of your printer in the Printer menu.
• Select Paper Handling from the unnamed menu at the center of the window.
• From the Pages to Print menu, select Odd Only.
• Depending on your printer type, select one of the following settings from the Page Order menu.
• Click Print.

Click here and refer the document for more steps on duplex printing.

Let me know how it goes.

I hope it helps and if you feel I have answered your question and concerns,

Please mark this post as a solution accepted and Kudos would also be appreciated.

Cheers.

[Thevelone]

OK, so this is a way to manually duplex a Word document.  Is this the only way to do this from this version of Word due to a bug or other problem?

As I stated before I can print duplex automatically with this printer from TextEdit and from a PDF document.  Hell, I just tried an Excel spreadsheet and it worked without any issue.

Word 15.32 for MAC just doesn't appear to honor the settings as I can configure it in the interface for the option Two-Sided to be Long Edge binding. 

Right now, my workaround is to just PDF the Word document and print it automatically duplexed and figure at some point Microsoft and or HP will fix the bug that doesn't allow it to work as it should.

[sandytechy20]

@Thevelone

Thanks for the reply.

And I appreciate your time and effort.

Good to know that you are able to print on both sides now.

I will also make sure the feedback which you provided is taken into consideration.

If you wish to say thanks for my effort to help,

Click the "Thumbs up" to give me a "Kudos" and also please mark it as “Accepted Solution”.

Cheers.

[Weeviler]

At last I have found a question that is the same as mine.  But the solution doesn't work.

I'm using a  Mac OS Sierra 10.12 and have just purchased an Office jet Pro 8720 on the basis that it will print double sided but have not been succesful.  I have tried the 'odd only' selection and tried printing as a PDF but that didn't work.  It seems the duplexing driver is not loaded although it shows as 4.3.0 but is not active.  The disk that came with the printer does not include Sierra  - only Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan.

Does this mean the printer will not print double sided with my computer?

[Weeviler]

Update on the printing problem.

I have had success printing a PDF - in the dialog box for PDF printing ,right at the bottom is a tab marked 'printer', click on that and there is a 'two sided' checkbox to activate - did that and got my first double sided document.

So then I converted a 40 page document from Word to a PDF, did the same operation and success!

However the problem of printing a Word document remains and this is a glitch that needs a patch.  I have also discovered the Open Office has the same checkbox for DS printing.  So maybe this solution has to come from Microsoft?  If this is the case I'm not holding my breath!

[mrome]

I believe I’ve figured out the cause of the duplexing (i.e. two-sided printing) problem with the HP 8720 driver on Word 2016 for MacOS, as well as a couple possible workarounds. I believe the driver issue is up to HP (or possibly Microsoft) to fix, so I’ll explain that last.

Workaround 1 - Page Set Up

This will require a small extra step every time you print.

1. Before printing, select “Page Set-up…” from the File menu.

2. Click the “Format For” drop-down menu and select “Any Printer”, then click OK.

3. Print like normal. 

NOTE: You will still need to set your print options to “Two-Side” as usual using these steps:

1. Choose “print” from the File Menu

2. Be sure you have the desired printer selected (HP Officejet Pro 8720 for me).

3. Click the drop-down menu that says “Copies & Pages” and select “Layout”.

4. Set the “two-sided” drop-down to “Long Edge Binding” (or short if your prefer).

5. Print when ready.

Workaround 2 - Add the AirPrint Driver instead.

This will require a slightly longer ONE-TIME step. After that, print like normal.

1. Open MacOS System Preferences

2. Choose “Printers & Scanners”

3. Click on the “+” button

4. Select the HP Officejet Pro from the list

5. Click the “Use” drop-down menu and choose the “AirPrint” option

6. Name this HP OfficeJet Pro MS_Word (or whatever else you like; the name doesn’t matter. I add the MS_Word to distinguish between the original driver and the AirPrint driver).

7. Click “Add”

8. In the “Printers & Scanners” pane, right click on the newly added printer and select “set default printer” (note: if you don’t want this as default printer; that’s fine then simply choose this printer each time in MS Word in the print menu before printing).

NOTE: You will still need to set your print options to “Two-Side” as usual using these steps:

1. Choose “print” from the File Menu

2. Be sure you have the desired printer selected (HP Officejet Pro 8720 for me).

3. Click the drop-down menu that says “Copies & Pages” and select “Layout”.

4. Set the “two-sided” drop-down to “Long Edge Binding” (or short if your prefer).

5. Print when ready.

@HP Support - The Driver Problem:

As far as I can tell, the reason the HP Officejet Pro 8720 cannot duplex (two-sided print) in MS Word 2016 for MacOS seems to be because the driver has the “US Letter” paper size located in the wrong place.  For some reason, it’s listed under “index card” instead of in it’s own category. This seems to cause the printer to believe it’s printing an index-card, and because the printer can’t two-side print index cards, it simply doesn’t print.  I discovered this after fiddling around with settings, and getting an error message about two-sided printing on index cards. (Note: this error message only appears in special circumstances, even though the cause always seems to be the same).

I believe HP could fix this by updating the driver and fixing the US Letter paper size category (and not listing under index card).

I hope this helps everyone!

[KittyPrint]

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to say thanks. This worked for me.  After two years my HP 8740 just stopped printing duplex, probably due to a recent Mac system update. I've wasted so much paper trying to get duplex printing back. I appreciate all you experts out there sharing your workarounds.