Printing Tips

For most of us, printing consists of using the mouse to select “File” then “Print” and clicking “OK”.

That’s a bit like buying a hamburger from a slot machine - you get the same thing every time, designed to meet the most popular requirements. Your printer will produce one copy of whatever you were looking at when you decided to print, using the current page settings (margins etc) and spitting out the pages in numerical order, starting at page one. This is the “default” setting because it represents what most people want to do, most of the time.

However, there’s usually more variety available if you want to take control, and do something different.

To understand what happens when you print it is useful to realise that your printer is itself a computer, designed to operate some mechanical components which are all bundled together with it in the same box.

Because there are many makes and models of printers, a PC computer will need some assistance if it is going to be able to reliably issue commands to a printer and always achieve the desired result, regardless which printer it is using.

This assistance is provided in the form of a specialised programme called a “printer driver” and is normally written by the printer manufacturer. When you buy a new printer you can’t use it until it has been “installed” in your computer (which means that its driver programme has to be installed). The driver programme receives commands from a computer programme (eg a word processor) and translates the commands into machine language which is obeyed by the dedicated computer inside the printer. This machine language output causes the paper drive rollers to rotate by the correct amount, and the droplets of ink to be squirted in the right place and so on, to produce the text or pictures you were expecting to get.

When you select “File” then “Print”, the dialogue box which appears is generated by the programme you are using at the time, and it isn’t the same for every programme.

For example, if you print from Notepad you won’t see a dialogue box at all because Notepad won’t offer you any choices about how the printing is done. Try printing from Wordpad and you will be offered a dialogue box with some limited choices. If you have something more sophisticated like MS Word, the printing choices from the dialogue box are more extensive.

Typical choices you can make from the print dialogue box:-

# Choose which printer to use.

This is for people who have more than one printer connected; the installed printers will be selectable by clicking the reveal arrow at the right end of the slot at the top of the box. Most people will have only one printer and will have no cause to use this choice. However, if you have replaced your original printer you may find the old one is still listed (its driver is still installed). If you select the old one and try to print, the instructions sent to your current printer may not make much sense to it, and the printed output could be garbled.

# Choose which page(s) to print.

The default setting is “All pages in the document”. However you will usually see a circular button underneath the “All pages” button which you can click to select specific pages to print.
Click in this circle, then select the range of pages (two boxes you can use to select “from page” and “to page”). For example, if you select “from page” 2 “to page” 2 this will print a copy of page 2 only. However, if in this example you enter 4 in the second box you will receive pages 2, 3 and 4.

MS Word is more flexible in this area. You can enter individual pages, or a range of pages.
For example, entering 2,4,6 8-12 would print pages 2, 4 and 6 followed by pages 8 to 12 inclusive.

# Choose how many copies to print and whether to collate.

In the “Copies” section of the dialogue box, enter how many copies you want to print. Usually there is also a box (already ticked by default) labelled “collate”. For example, if you choose to print four copies of a three page document the printer will normally produce one set of pages 1, 2 and 3, then will repeat this until you have four sets of pages. They will fall into the output tray in numerical order with page 1 at the bottom of each set and the last page (3) on top of each set.

If you click in the “collate” box to remove the tick you will receive four copies of page 1, followed by four copies of page 2, and finally four copies of page 3 on top of the pile.

For simple programmes that’s about all the printing choices you may get, except perhaps for the box marked “Print to File”. I’ve never found a practical use for this choice myself; it produces a file which you can’t read with anything (although it can be understood by the printer if you can find a way of sending it to the printer).

If your programme (eg MS Word) has other options, check them out. You may find you can choose to print just the odd or even numbered pages (eg just print the odd pages, than turn the pages over, reinsert them and print the even pages on the other side of the paper), or scale the printing to get two or more pages per sheet of paper etc.
Look for other buttons in the dialogue box - MS Word has an “Options” button which displays yet another box of choices, including printing in reverse order (ie last page prints first and is on the bottom, first page ends up where you want it, on top).

There’s another important button labelled “Properties”. Click this, and you will be presented with a set of choices that are created by the printer driver programme and are specific to the printer you’re using.

The layout of choices here will vary widely, depending on the capabilities of the printer, and the features designed into the printer control programme by its maker. the only advice I can offer in using your printer’s features is to “read the printer manual and the printer’s Help information.” If you don’t understand something in a print dialogue box, look for the ? sign in the top right corner of the dialogue box. Click this ?, then put your mouse pointer on the item you don’t understand and click again. With a bit of luck, an explanatory box will pop up.

Very few people venture into this area of control, yet it may be well worth the effort of doing some experimenting, especially if you are printing work in colour. The choices available may make a large difference in the quality of printing you experience. Usually the default settings will be OK for average work. However, adjusting the settings may provide better quality (eg for printing photos) if you are happy to have the printer take a bit longer to print, or use a bit more ink. Often you can change the colour density and contrast to obtain more natural looking results than the default settings provide.

If you want to experiment, choose a photo which appeals to you (preferably one with some skin tones in it) and try printing it several times with different settings. By comparing the results you should come to some conclusions about how to make adjustments, and have a better understanding about your printer’s capabilities.

By the way, with colour printing the quality of paper used can make a huge difference to the results, so make your final printing adjustments using the same grade of paper you wish to print the finished work on.
Also, if there is a “Draft” mode you can use it to print a file copy or rough copy - it’s faster and uses less ink so your ink cartridge will go further.

Unwanted Blank Pages

It can be annoying to have your printer feeding out unwanted blank pages, but the machine is only doing what it’s been told to do. Perhaps the most common reason for this is the presence of superfluous “new paragraph” characters at the end of the document.

The “new paragraph” character is inserted into a document whenever you tap the “Enter” key. It produces a vertical space and causes any following text to be displayed one line further down the page, commencing from the beginning of that line (the beginning of a line can be the left, centre or right side of the page depending on the paragraph alignment option you are using).

In printer language, this “new paragraph” character is interpreted as a “line feed” character, and causes the paper drive rolls to rotate sufficiently to move the paper by one line.

The easiest way to check for blank pages is to use the “print preview” function in your word processor.
If there’s no Print “Preview” button on the toolbar (looks like a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass at the side) you should be able to access from the “File” section of the menu. By previewing the document, page by page, you can see if there are any blank pages.

If you have one or more blank pages at the end, simply move the blinker to the end of the text, click in the line below* then hold down the “Shift” and “Ctrl” keys together and tap the “End” key to highlight to the very end of the document. Then tap “Delete” to remove all the invisible “new paragraph” characters.

*Clicking in the line below the text leaves one blank line. If that still causes a new page to start you can remove the final “new paragraph” character, but you may find that this changes the formatting of the last line.

If there are blank pages within the document (between good pages) the cause will probably be “page break” characters which were inserted to force new pages. Normally you put these characters in because you want to start a new page, but if you later edit the document and add something to a page which finishes in a page break, the new text may cause a new page to start anyway, and the page break may simply cause another blank page to be displayed. The obvious cure is to remove the offending page break character.

John Selby.

First Printed in SNN Newsletter September 2003