Printing your documents - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you go to print a document from your Mac, you'll find there are several print options available. Some options you'll see will be specific to whichever brand and model of printer you have, and to which application you're printing from, while other options are standard regardless of the printer you're using. In this movie, we'll take a look at some of these comment print options. Currently, I have a text edit document open. The contents of this document really aren't important right now; I just need an open document so I can walk you through the printing process. So as we know, I'm going to choose "File", "Print". Now the first time you go to "Print", you'll see this version of the print dialogue box. This is sort of the minimalist, only the basics version that you'll need if you just want to print your entire document as is with no special options. At the top, you have the printer menu for selecting which printer you want to print to. You should see any printers you've set up or which are connected to your network here. Just select the one you want to use. Then you can enter the number of copies you want to print. There's also a two-sided option if you want to print to both sides of the paper and your printer supports that option. Below that, you can choose whether you want to print all the pages in the document, a single page, which when selected lets you specify which page you want to print, or you can print a range of pages, which let's you specify from which page to which page you want to print. Below that we see a preview of the page. Then we have a PDF menu here, which is used to generate an Adobe Acrobat file. PDF's can be viewed on any computer, Mac or PC, that has the free Adobe Reader software installed, or in the case of the Mac, you can also view PDF's using the preview application that comes as part of the operating system. But as you can see, clicking the PDF button gives you several options for what you might want to do with the PDF you're generating, like just saving it to a location on your computer with "Save as PDF", or "Send in Mail" to generate the PDF and then attach it to an email message. When you choose a PDF option, it doesn't matter which printer you have selected, or if you don't even have a printer connected to your Mac at all. For example, you can select "Open in Preview", which will show you what your printed page will look like. At this point if you want, you can choose "File" "Save" to save this as a PDF document, or if you really did want to print to the selected printer, just click the "Print" button down here. I'm going to cancel in this case and go back to "Text Edit". And here again, I'll choose "File", "Print". And these last two buttons here in the simple print dialogue box are "Cancel", which will close the print dialogue box without doing anything, and "Print", which you click when you're actually ready to print. So again, these options should be all you need if you just want to print your document as it is in its entirety. But there will be times when you want to customize your print job. For those times, click "Show Details", and as you can see that expands the print dialogue box. So now we see a preview of the page on the left, and we see several more options here to the right. First of all, under the printer menu, we now see the "Presets" menu, which is for saving custom print savings. For example, if you're always using the same settings, like printing three copies on U.S. letter size paper, you would choose those settings first, then choose "Save Current Settings as Preset", which will allow you to store those settings so you can select it in the future and not have to navigate through a series of menus each time. The "Copies" field is the same as we saw it before. Underneath that, the page options are a little bit different. Now you can choose either "All", which again prints all the pages, or "From", which allows you to select a range. If you only want to print one page, type that page's number in both fields here. Depending on the application you're printing from, you may see other options here, such as printing the pages you have selected in the application. And if your printer has the ability to print to different sizes of paper, you may see a "Paper Size" menu next. Now this last menu here is unnamed, but it contains the most options of all the menus here. Generally, you'll find the name of the application you're printing from, which when selected will give the options specific to that application. For example, here in "Text Edit", you can check "Print header and footer". Different programs will have different options. Another selection that's fairly common across all applications is "Layout". This allows you to choose how many of your document's pages will print to each physical sheet of paper. Choosing to print more than one page to each sheet can conserve paper and ink. And you'll probably want to take some time to browse through the other options that appear in the print dialogue boxes for the applications you use. But the ones we've looked at here generally will appear in nearly all applications that print.