1. You are often presented with a Print dialog asking you to choose which connected printer you want to print to and what printing options (if any) you’d like to utilize. When you have you made your selection, you click the Print button to print your document.
2. Once you hit Print, the printing system in Leopard (CUPS) takes your document and converts it to a language that your printer will understand. It does this using a translation file known as a print filter.
3. Once the file is translated, this translated file is put in a special block of memory called a print spool where the file is then streamed to your printer over whatever connection protocol is being used.
4. The printer, as it receives this stream, usually starts printing the file as it receives it.
Because your computer can usually feed information to your printer faster than it can print, a lot of communication is necessary between your printer and your computer to regulate the flow of information. If your printer runs out of memory (and many less expensive printers have very little to begin with) and your computer keeps sending the data, then data will get lost, and you’ll end up with a garbled mess . . . not to worry, this rarely happens these days.
In a nutshell, that’s it. It sounds like a lot of complicated stuff going on, and actually there is, but luckily for you, all you need to worry about is step 1 and occasionally adding more paper and ink/toner to your printer. Of course, before you can print, you need to set up your printer.
Setting Up a USB Printer
The most common printers, and the easiest to set up, are basic USB printers. In general, to set up a USB printer, plug in the printer power cord, and then plug in a USB cable from your printer into one of the USB ports on your computer. Unless your printer is a super-new model or a really strange off-brand, it’s likely that’s all you need to do. Your printer is ready to use. If in doubt, take a look in the Print & Fax pane of System Preferences (Figure 5-1); if you see the printer you just plugged in listed and correctly identified, you are good to go.
Figure 5-1.The Print & Fax pane of System Preferences showing the HP Photosmart printer we just
At this point, you may be skeptical that everything worked; in other words, that was too easy, right? You didn’t even need to insert the CD that came with the printer. If you double-click the printer icon in the Print & Fax preference pane, the printer’s Print Queue window (Figure 5-2) will open. This window provides information about your printer, including information about any documents currently printing or waiting to be printed (documents waiting in the print spool to be printed are called print jobs). If you want to test your printer, you can select the Printer ➤ Print Test Page command from the menu bar. If the test page prints, then all is well, and your printer is ready to use.
Figure 5-2.The printer’s Print Queue window provides information about a specific printer connected to your computer.
So, what happens if things don’t work or if your printer isn’t recognized correctly when you plug it in? In this situation, you may need to install a driver for your printer.
Printer Drivers
When you install Leopard, by default it installs a large number of printer drivers. There are gen- erally up-to-date drivers for most current and old printers from most printer manufacturers (including Brother, Canon, Epson, Fuji, HP, Lexmark, and others). The reason why your printer’s driver may not be installed by default could be that your printer is too new, too old, or some other brand. Regardless, you may need to install a proper driver. Now, most printers come with a CD that includes the driver (and a bunch of other software) for your computer. We rec- ommend that you not use this. Rather, go to your printer manufacturer’s web site, and download the latest driver for your printer. Make sure it’s for Mac OS X, and make sure it’s for your ver- sion of Mac OS X. Then install this according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and try again.
CHAPTER 5CONNECTING PERIPHERALS TO YOUR MAC 101
NOTE Often printer drivers from manufacturers include more than what is really necessary for you to print. They often include special utility software and sometimes even strange graphics and printing software. By downloading the driver from the manufacturer’s web site, you at least eliminate some of the extra software, and manufacturers may offer driver-only updates along with utilities and driver/utility bundles. In addition, occasionally during the install routine you can select a custom install and install only the driver. To print effectively, you almost always need only the driver. As for the utilities and other software, sometimes it’s quite useful, and sometimes it’s not. Occasionally the printer’s utilities are just plain evil—lurking around in the background, popping up unnecessary windows, and eating away system resources. Whether you install these is up to you (provided you have a choice), but we tend to avoid these things unless necessary or unless we have found through experience that they are indeed useful.
Connecting to a Network Printer or Shared Printer
Printers in most companies as well as more and more homes are accessed through a network.
These printers could be actual network printers, complete with network interfaces (either wired or wireless). Or they could be common USB printers attached to other computers on a network or a network print server (such as the ones built into Apple’s AirPort and AirPort Express). Con- necting to these printers ranges from almost as easy as connecting a USB printer to fairly easy if you know exactly what you are doing. We’ll walk you through the general process using a real- life example of connecting to a networked Brother multifunction device (a fax/scanner/printer/
copier).
The first step of adding a printer is to open the Print & Fax pane from System Preferences, and click the + button at the bottom of the printer list. This opens a Printer Browser window (Figure 5-3).
Figure 5-3.The Printer Browser window allows you browse and pick various types of printers to connect to.
As we look in the browser, we see Brother MFC-440CN listed, which happens to be the printer we want. When we select it in the list, our computer will try to find the name, location, and driver automatically. In this case, it succeeded (Figure 5-4).
Figure 5-4.After selecting the printer we want to add, Leopard automatically attempts to determine the name, location, and appropriate print driver.
NOTE You may notice that the Location field is blank; this is because the printer is connected using Bonjour (Apple’s implementation of Zeroconf). Bonjour is a special networking technol- ogy that allows systems on a network to identify themselves and the services they offer in a flexible way without a central name server. Since this allows the location to be dynamic, it is not listed.
If the print driver is not found automatically, then you will need to select an appropriate driver manually for the printer. To do this, click the Print Using drop-down menu, and there you should first try “Select a driver to use,” which will provide a list of all the currently available print drivers. If your driver isn’t listed but you have it on your system, you can select Other, which will open a standard Open dialog box for you to locate and open the appropriate driver.
When your printer is selected and set up with the proper driver, click the Add button, and your printer will be ready to use (Figure 5-5).
NOTE If you are mostly but not quite sure you have everything set up correctly, don’t panic.
Try it. If something is wrong, you can adjust it later, or at worst you can remove it and start over again.
Ninety-nine percent of the time adding a printer is quite easy. But what about the other times—the times when your printer just doesn’t get automatically recognized?
NOTE There tends to be a few ways to think about network printers. Some printers broadcast their presence (such as Bonjour printers), and they usually just show up in the default options of the Printer Browser window. Other printers, like those that use Windows and AppleTalk, are browsable; that is, you can navigate around the network to find available printers in the various Windows workgroups or AppleTalk zones. Finally, there are other types of network printers, and basically, you have to know where they are located on the network, and usually some more information about them, to connect to them.
CHAPTER 5CONNECTING PERIPHERALS TO YOUR MAC 103
Figure 5-5.Our newly added printer shown in the Print & Fax preference pane
When you are attempting to connect to a network printer at work or in a large computing environment, or you are attempting to use a printer that is being shared by another computer, it might not just show up in the default printer listing in the Printer Browser window. When con- fronted with this situation, you need to find out what type of printer sharing is being used. The most common choice around homes and offices would be some sort of Windows printer sharing.
Other less common network printer sharing protocols include the following:
AppleTalk: This is an older Apple networking technology that a large number of older network printers support. Connecting to an AppleTalk printer is similar to connecting to a Windows printer. AppleTalk printers can be set up under the AppleTalk options in the Printer Browser window.
Bluetooth: There just aren’t that many Bluetooth printers available right now, but if you happen to have one, the Bluetooth printer should be easily discoverable if it’s in range, at which point you will need to pair the device and select a driver. Only the discovery and pairing should differ from the process of connecting a USB printer or a Bonjour printer.
Internet Printer Protocol (IPP): Actually, this is fairly common since Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is built around IPP, and CUPS (which, although an open source system, has recently become an Apple product after acquiring the CUPS trademarks and hiring the original developer, Michael Sweet) is the printing system used in Leopard and is the default printing system for many modern Unix and Linux systems. Microsoft also has IPP built into its printing services. Connecting to IPP printers within your local network is usually easy (in fact, that’s what you are doing when you connect using Bonjour); however, occasionally the printer you are attempting to connect to isn’t visible on the network, so in order to connect, you will need the printer’s location (usually an IP address or even domain), and you may need to know the path to the printer (commonly called the printer queue). IPP printers can be set up under the IP options in the Printer Browser window.
Line Printer Daemon (LPD): This is an older Unix printing system that has largely been replaced by CUPS. To connect with an LPD printer, you will need its network address, and you will need to know the name of the print queue. An LPD printer can be set up under the IP options in the Printer Browser window.
Others: There is a handful of other, less common, mostly older, proprietary methods of connecting to a network printer. Leopard supports a number of these, including HP Jetdirect, Canon IJ Network, Epson FireWire, Epson TCP/IP, and HP IP Printing.
If you are connecting to a Windows network printer (shared or otherwise), click the Windows button, and then browse through the network until you locate the printer you want (Figure 5-6). It’s unlikely that a driver will be selected for you automatically, so you will need to select “Select a driver to use” from the Print Using menu. When you select the appropriate driver, click the Add button.
Figure 5-6.Browsing the Windows network for a shared or network printer
CHAPTER 5CONNECTING PERIPHERALS TO YOUR MAC 105
NOTE The HP printer we connected to over a Windows network is the same Photosmart 7660 that was immediately recognized when we plugged it in to our USB port. Interestingly, though, when we go browsing for the 7600 series driver, it doesn’t exist in the list. So, what gives? Well, some printer manufacturers don’t release proper CUPS drivers for their USB printers. Some reckon this is so people who want to print over the network will have to spend extra money for the network printer that has network drivers. We aren’t saying this is so; however, with this par- ticular series printer, HP updated the Windows drivers in such a way that it made it suddenly very difficult to use this printer over the network from Windows. As more and more devices come along that allow USB printers to be used over networks, we’re not sure how this will play out, but it’s something you should be aware of. Still, even though HP doesn’t provide proper 7600 CUPS drivers, the 7550 driver works fine. Also, it’s worth noting that since CUPS has been used in other Unix and Linux systems for a while, there are numerous “unofficial” CUPS drivers developed by pioneering individuals for many existing printers (the 7550 driver included in Leopard happens to be one of them).
NOTE PostScript printers should all print just fine by selecting the generic PostScript driver, though special features of the printers may not be available through generic (or unofficial) drivers.
Printer Options and the Print Queue
Once a printer is set up and working properly, there isn’t much you need to do, but there are some options available to you in the Print & Fax preference pane. When you select a printer in the preference pane, the view area displays some brief information about your printer and also has one check box and a couple of buttons. The “Share this printer” check box will allow you to share this printer with other users on your network (provided that printer sharing is enabled in the Sharing preference pane). Below that are the Open Print Queue button, which will open the print queue just like double-clicking the printer icon, and the Options button.
Clicking the Options button will open a sheet (a special type of attached window) providing three tabs (Figure 5-7). The General tab provides basic information about the printer and the driver. The Driver tab lists your current driver in a drop-down list and allows you to select a new driver if you want. The Supply Levels tab can show you how much ink or toner is left in your printer; however, this relies on a number of variables and may not work accurately (or at all).
The Supplies button at the bottom of this tab will take you to a web site to buy more printer supplies.
The Open Print Queue button will open the printer’s print queue (shown in Figure 5-2). As mentioned, this will provide information about what print jobs are being printed or waiting to be printed. This will also let you pause the printer, delete print jobs, and even rearrange the order of awaiting print jobs. The Info button on the toolbar will open the printer Options sheet you saw in Figure 5-7. The Utility button will sometimes open a printer utility that allows you to uti- lize special printer features. The printer manufacturer usually provides the utility, and each one can vary greatly from another (if they work at all). The Supply Levels button again opens the Options sheet but with the Supply Levels tab selected (Figure 5-8).
In general, setting up a printer to work with your Mac is a fairly easy process. Even when it’s not automatic, the features in Leopard tend to make it at least easier than may have been the case in the past (or is with other computer systems).
Printing from an Application
To use your printer, you usually just need to select File ➤Print... from the menu bar (or press Cmd+P) in any application. This will open a standard print dialog box that walks you through the printing process. The default Print dialog (Figure 5-9) is simple, with only a few options.
Figure 5-7.The printer Options sheet
Figure 5-8.The Supply Levels tab in the printer’s Options sheet. With some printers, depending on the driver and the connection, this information may not be available.
Figure 5-9.The default simple Print dialog box
CHAPTER 5CONNECTING PERIPHERALS TO YOUR MAC 107
NOTE Many applications will open the Print dialog as a sheet, rather than a floating window, as shown in Figure 5-9.
If you have multiple printers connected to your computer, you can select the one you want to print to from the Printer drop-down menu (your default printer will be initially selected for you). The Presets button allows you select any preselected print options you may want to use.
For most printers, Standard is the only initial option unless you save your own print options;
however, many photo printers include a few other options (different size prints, borderless options, and so on).
Along the bottom of the Print dialog box are four buttons. Print will send your document to the printer. Cancel will close the dialog box without printing. Preview will open your document in the Preview application that will give you an onscreen representation of what the printed doc- ument will look like. PDF will open a submenu that will provide you with various options from creating a PDF file from your document.
NOTE All of Mac OS X’s graphics are PDF based; as such, you will find that it can create a PDF out of any document from the Print dialog without any additional software.
For more options for your printing, you can extend the Print dialog by clicking the inverted- triangle button (the Disclosure button) to the right of the selected printer. This will provide many more printing options (Figure 5-10).
Figure 5-10.The extended Print dialog box provides many more printing options, depending on the print driver and the application.
The extended Print dialog provides a number of additional print options. The standard extended elements include a preview of the document, the ability to print multiple copies of the document, the ability to print only a range of pages rather than the entire document, the ability to adjust paper size and orientation, and the ability to scale the document up or down. However, numerous other options are available from the drop-down menu. This menu includes application options, options associated with your printer’s features, color-matching options, advanced paper-handling options, scheduling options, fax options, and more.