Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Print Center

The Print Center Application (/Applications/Utilities) lets you define the list of printers available for use from your machine, as well as obtain queue and status information for each of them. Print Center acts as the UI for printing once the application has finished rendering all the pages and sent them off to the print server.

Print Center has two views: an editable list of all the printers the computer knows about and an interactive look into the print queue for each one.

The Printer List

Figure 8-2 shows a typical Printer List window. The default printer—the one that appears already selected in the standard Print dialog’s Printer menu (Figure 8-1)—is in boldface. To change the default printer, select a different one by clicking on its row, then choosing Printers → Make Default (

-D).

The window has just three columns: Name holds the printer’s network name or IP address, Kind describes the type of network connection between the computer and this printer, and Status shows a very brief summary of the printer’s current state, with regard to any print jobs you’ve sent it. Double-clicking on any printer’s row in this table summons its queue window, which provides much more insight into its current activities, as explained later in Section 8.3.2.

To remove a printer from the list, select its row and then hit the Delete button (or select Printers → Delete).

Adding and configuring ...