Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Printer Setup Utility

The Printer Setup Utility 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. Printer Setup Utility acts as the UI for printing once the application has finished rendering all the pages and sent them off to the print server. The Printer Setup Utility also performs similar functions for faxing, allowing you to view faxes queued for sending.

Printer Setup Utility 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 9-2 shows a typical Printer List window. The default printer—the one that appears already selected in the standard Print dialog’s Printer menu (Figure 9-1)—is in boldface. To change the default printer, select a different one by clicking on its row, then choosing Printers→Make Default (-D), or click the Make Default icon in the toolbar.

The first of the window’s five columns holds the In Menu checkbox, which allows you to specify whether you want that printer to show up in the print dialog box’s list of printers. Name holds the printer’s network name or IP address, Status shows a very brief summary of the printer’s current state, with regard to any print jobs you’ve sent it, Kind shows the model of printer (based on the PPD associated ...