iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Printing Your Documents

For decades, pundits have declared the paperless office to be just around the corner—and now that we’ve waited long enough, it appears to be slowly coming true. After years of skyrocketing paper consumption, paper use in the U.S. has leveled off in the past several years and slowly begun to decline. A new generation of worker has become accustomed to reading and archiving documents on the computer instead of squirreling them away into file cabinets.

We’re still a long way from going completely paperless, though, and printing will undoubtedly be one of your preferred methods for liberating Pages documents from your Mac. Printing Pages files is just like printing anything else on your computer—so if you have a handle on how printing works in other programs, feel free to skip this section.

Page Setup

Setting the Page Setup options should really be a part of the document setup you did at the beginning of the document (see Chapter 5 for details on how to format your document). But still, it’s a good idea to double-check it now. Choose File → Page Setup to open the Page Setup dialog box (Figure 9-1), whose main purpose in life is to choose the paper size, orientation, and scaling adjustment (if any) for the document.

The first pop-up menu, labeled Settings, always says Page Attributes when you open the Page Setup dialog box. Leave it set that way, choose the name of your printer from the “Format for” pop-up menu, and, from the Paper Size pop-up menu, choose the paper ...