13.4 Fancy Printer Tricks

The masses of Windows users generally slog through life, choosing File Print, clicking OK, and then drumming their fingers as they wait for the paper to slide out of the printer. But your printer can do more than that ”much more. Here are just a few of the stunts that await the savvy PC fan.

13.4.1 Printing at 39,000 Feet

Printing any document is really a two-step procedure. First, Windows converts the document into a seething mass of printer codes in the form of a spool file on your hard drive. Second, it feeds that mass of code to the printer.

When you're not connected to your printer ”for example, when you're sitting in seat 23B several miles over Detroit ”you can separate these two tasks . You can do the time-consuming part of the printing operation (creating the spool files) right there on the plane. Then, later, upon your happy reunion with the printer, you can simply unleash the flood of stored spool files, which will print very quickly.

To set this up, right-click the icon for your printer in the Printers and Faxes window (Figure 13-4). From the shortcut menu, choose Pause Printing. That's all there is to it. Now you can merrily "print" your documents, 100 percent free of error messages. Windows quietly stores all the half-finished printouts as files on your hard drive.

When the printer is reconnected to your machine, right-click its icon once again ”but this time, choose Resume Printing from its shortcut menu. You'll find that the printer springs to life almost immediately, spewing forth your stored printouts with impressive speed.

13.4.2 Sharing a Printer

If you have more than one PC connected to a network, as described in Chapter 18, they all can use the same printer. In the old days, this convenience was restricted to expensive Ethernet network printers like laser printers. But in Windows XP, you can share even the cheapest little inkjet that's connected to the USB port of one computer.

To begin, sit down at the computer to which the printer is attached. In the Printers and Faxes window, right-click the printer's icon and, from the shortcut menu, choose Sharing. Proceed as described in Figure 13-9.

Figure 13-9. Top: Turn on "Share this printer," and then give the printer a name in the Share name text box. (No spaces or punctuation allowed ”and keep it short.) Click OK. The printer is now available on your network. Bottom: Other people, seated at their own computers, can now bring your printer onto their own screens. (If the other PCs aren't running Windows XP, click the Additional Drivers button on the Sharing tab and turn on the checkboxes for the Windows versions they are using.)

Once you've shared the printer, other people on the network can add it to their own Printers and Faxes windows like this:

In the Printers and Faxes window, click "Add a printer" in the task pane at the left side.

The Add a Printer Wizard appears, exactly as described earlier in this chapter.
Click Next. On the second screen, click the bottom option: "A network printer, or a printer attached to another computer." Click Next .

Now you're asked to locate the printer that's been shared. If you're like most people, you'll want to browse for it (choose it from a list). If you're a geek, you can click the second button and then type the printer's UNC code (Section 20.1.3). And if you're geeky beyond belief, you can use the third option, which lets you send your printouts to a printer somewhere else on the Internet. (The downside: Bringing the printouts back to your desk can take days.)
Select "Connect to this printer (or browse for a printer)," and then click Next. On the screen that appears, click the name of the printer you want, as shown in Figure 13-9 at bottom.

On the final screens of the wizard, you'll be asked if you want this printer to be your default (primary) printer. After answering, click the Finish button to close the wizard. The shared printer now appears in your Printers and Faxes folder, even though it's not directly connected to your machine.

13.4.3 Printing to a File

When it comes to printing, most of the time you probably think of printing onto paper. In certain circumstances, however, you may not actually want a printout. Instead, you might want to create an electronic printer file on your hard drive, which can be printed later. You might want to do so, for example, when:

You're working on a document at home, and you've got only a cheesy $49 inkjet printer. By creating a printer file, you can delay printing until tomorrow, in order to use the office's $4,000 color laser printer.
You plan to send your finished work to a service bureau ”that is, a professional typesetting shop. Sending a finished printer file avoids incompatibilities of applications, fonts, layout programs, and so on.
You want to give a document to someone who doesn't have the program you used to create it, but has the same printer. If you email the printer file to her, she'll get to see your glorious design work slide out of her printer nonetheless.

13.4.3.1 Creating a printer file

To create such a printer file, choose File Print, just as you would print any document. The Print dialog box appears; now turn on the "Print to file" option. When you then click OK or Print, the Print to File dialog box opens. It resembles the standard Save As dialog box, in that you can choose a drive, a folder, and a filename. The file type for a document printing to a file is a Printer File, which has the file extension .prn.

13.4.3.2 Printing a printer file

To print a printer file, choose Start All Programs Accessories Command Prompt. You've just started an MS-DOS command session; your cursor is blinking on the command line.

Now type this:

copy c:\foldername \ filename .prn lpt1: /b

Here's how this instruction breaks down:

Copy is the name of the command you use to print the file ”notice that it's followed by a space.
C : is the letter of the drive that contains your printer file. Omit this part if the printer file is on the current drive (usually C:).
\foldername is the name of the folder into which you saved the printer file.
\filename is the name you gave the file.
.prn is the filename extension (which Windows added to the file automatically when you saved the printer file).
lpt1 : is the port to which the printer is connected. Note the colon following the name, and also note there's a space before this part of the command. If the printer is attached to LPT2, substitute that port name.
/b tells the Copy command that the file is binary (containing formatting and other codes), not simply text.

NOTE

A printer file (a .prn file) can only be printed on the same model that was selected in the Print dialog box when the file was generated. If you want to create a printer file for that color printer at work, in other words, be sure to first install its driver on your computer.

13.4.4 Limiting Hours of Access

If it's just you, your Dell, and a color inkjet, then you're entitled to feel baffled by this feature, which lets you declare your printer off-limits during certain hours of the day. But if you're the manager of some office whose expensive color laser printer makes printouts that cost a dollar apiece, you may welcome a feature that prevents employees from hanging around after hours in order to print out 500 copies of their head shots.

To specify such an access schedule for a certain printer, follow the instructions in Figure 13-10.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
Color Management

As you may have discovered through painful experience, computers aren't great with color. That's because each device you use to create and print digital images "sees" color a little bit differently, which explains why the deep amber captured by your scanner may be rendered as brownish on your monitor, but come out as a bit orangey on your Epson inkjet printer. Since every gadget defines and renders color in its own way, colors are often inconsistent as a print job moves from design to proof to press.

The Windows color management system (CMS) attempts to sort out this mess, serving as a translator among all the different pieces of hardware in your workflow. For this to work, each device (scanner, monitor, printer, copier , and so on) must be calibrated with a unique CMS profile ”a file that tells your PC exactly how your particular monitor (or scanner, or printer, or digital camera) defines colors. Armed with the knowledge contained within the profiles, the CMS software can make on-the-fly color corrections, compensating for the various quirks of the different devices.

Most of the people who lose sleep over color fidelity do commercial color scanning and printing, where "off" colors are a big deal ”after all, a customer might return a product after discovering, for example, that the actual product color doesn't match the photo on a Web site. Furthermore, not every gadget comes with a CMS profile, and not every gadget can even accommodate one (if yours does, you'll see a tab called Color Management in the Properties dialog box for your printer, as shown here).

If you're interested in this topic, open the Color Management tab for your printer. The Automatic setting usually means that Windows came with its own profile for your printer, which it has automatically assigned. If you click Manual, you can override this decision and apply a new color profile (that you downloaded from the printer company's Web site, for example).

Remember to follow the same procedure for the other pieces of your color chain ” monitors , scanners , and so on. Look for the Color Management tab or dialog box, accessible from their respective Properties dialog boxes.

13.4.5 Add a Separator Page

If your PC is on a network whose other members bombard a single laser printer with printouts, you might find separator pages useful ”the printer version of fax cover sheets. A separator page is generated before each printout, identifying the document and its owner.

This option, too, is accessible from the Advanced tab of the printer's Properties dialog box (Figure 13-10). Click the Separator Page button at the bottom of the dialog box. In the Separator Page dialog box, click the Browse button to choose a .sep (separator page) file.

You'll see that Windows XP comes with four of them:

Sysprint.sep is the one you probably want. Not only does this page include the name, date, time, and so on, but it also automatically switches the laser printer to PostScript mode ”if it's not already in that mode.
Pcl.sep is the same idea, except that it switches the laser printer to PCL mode ”commonly found on HP printers ”before printing. (PostScript and PCL are the two most common languages understood by office laser printers.)
Pscript.sep switches the printer to PostScript mode, but doesn't print out a separator page.
Sysprtj.sep prints a separator page, switches the printer to PostScript mode, and sets Japanese fonts, if they're available on your printer.

13.4.6 Save Printouts for Later

Ordinarily, each printout travels from your PC into a temporary holding file on the hard drive (the spool file), gets fed from there to the printer, and then disappears forever.

But sometimes it can be useful to keep the spool files on hand for use later. Maybe you print standard contracts all the time, or price lists, or restaurant menus . It's much faster to reprint something directly from the spool file than to open the original document and print it again from scratch.

The key to making Windows hang onto your already-printed documents is in the Advanced tab of the printer's Properties dialog box (see Figure 13-10). Just turn on "Keep printed documents."

From now on, every time you generate a printout, Windows maintains a copy of it in the printer's window (the one that appears when you double-click the printer icon in the Printers and Faxes window; see Figure 13-8). To reprint a document you've already printed, right-click its name in this list and choose Restart from the shortcut menu. (If you do this frequently, consider dragging the printer icon to your desktop, to the Start menu, or to the Quick Launch toolbar so that it will be easier to open the next time around.)