Windows XP Power Hound

Printers and Printing

It's been more than a decade since pundits proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. That prediction has turned out to be about as accurate as the Dow Jones's topping 35,000. Since printers are still being asked to churn out piles of paper, you need to know how to keep them in shape. This section explains how to get the most bang for your page.

Tip

If you have a choice, use a printer's USB port rather than its parallel port. Parallel port connections use a substantial amount of your PC's microprocessor, slowing down all other programs. In fact, some programs may not respond at all during especially large print jobs sent through the parallel port. (New printers typically connect to PCs using USB ports; many don't even have parallel ports.)

Printing Font Samples

Windows XP features dozens of interesting and unique fonts. Some are fun, some professional, some downright funky. Problem is, when you use a program like Word, you have no real way to preview them. Sure, Word's got a drop-down list of font choices, but you can only see a few characters of each font. What you really need is a full preview of every single character in the font.

The system's built-in font previewer is one of those hidden XP gems that few people know about, and even fewer use. To view and print samples of a font on your system choose Control Panel → Appearance and Themes → Fonts. Windows Explorer displays a folder with a list of every font on your system.

Figure 10-5. When you ...