How to Become a Printing Pro: Mastering Your Printer Driver

Printer Commuter Crash Grade

Sure, the easiest way to churn out a simple print job is to striking Ctrl-P (or Command-P for you Mac users). But taking a few minutes to explore your printer commuter tin unearth a whole new layer of control over your printing processes. A printer driver, in brusk, is a utility that allows your figurer to communicate with a printer, and lets you control numerous functions in your print jobs. Although you tin change a few settings when you launch a print command from within a Windows application, you tin access a number of next-level functions through the commuter interface. You are fifty-fifty likely to notice useful press options that you weren't fifty-fifty aware of.

Drivers either come on the setup disc included with your printer, or you download them from the manufacturer'due south website as part of the setup procedure. One of the driver's main tasks is to translate files sent from a reckoner into a printer language for output. Thus, in some high-stop printers you lot may accept more one printer driver, one for each printer linguistic communication, near normally PCL and PostScript. The manufacturer'due south recommended driver generally installs equally the default driver, and sometimes yous have to check a box during the setup procedure to install any additional drivers. For near business printing, PCL—a versatile printer language created past HP—is preferable, offer faster printing with less drain on memory during printing.

PostScript is Adobe'due south printer language, and Adobe programs such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat are optimized for use with it. Equally such, it's normally used by graphic designers. Although PostScript is mostly used on Macs, it'due south likewise compatible with Windows. Merely unless you lot need information technology to print out graphics files (or you lot impress a ton of PDFs), you're better off sticking to PCL. You can always switch betwixt the two if need be.

Accessing Your Printer Commuter

To admission your printer driver's interface in Windows 10, type Command Panel in the search field in your toolbar and printing Enter. A pull-down menu at the Control Panel screen's upper right lets you lot view the folio by Category, Large Icons, or Modest Icons. If you are in Category view, yous demand to switch to either of the icon views. From there, click on Devices and Printers, and you lot should come up to a screen similar to the one yous come across below, with a serial of icons identifying printers for which yous have installed drivers, and the default printer identified with a greenish checkmark.

Right-clicking on the icon for the printer yous want to access will bring up a card. The two choices under that menu that house most of the driver's functions are Printing Preferences and Printer Backdrop. Printer Properties lets you choose ports and control security features, while Press Preferences—past far the most important of the two for everyday use—houses a wealth of settings for layout, print quality, contour presets, and more than.

You can also access your driver'southward settings from within many Windows programs equally you fix to print. When y'all click on File at the screen'southward upper left corner, and so Print from the pull-down menu, you will see the Print screen, which offers a few basic options: number of copies, paper size, one- or two-sided printing, and the like. Some programs (Word included) provide a link to Printing Preferences from this page; others, such equally the Chrome browser, do not.

What Does Information technology Exercise?

Virtually every printer function that yous might want to change can be controlled through the driver. And considering the huge variety of printers on the market today, they can vary widely depending on the printer'southward purpose. For example, the driver for a professional photo printer will be quite different than an function monochrome laser.

That said, they have common elements. When yous open up the commuter, you should run across a dialog box with a series of tabs at top left; the leftmost tab—ofttimes called Layout or Setup—includes information like the number of copies to be printed, one-sided or two-sided press (if your printer supports car-duplexing), paper type, and press fashion presets (such as Photo Printing, Business concern Document, and Brilliant Colour). Many simple consumer printers have just a few tabs that consolidate the of import printing functions, while college-end business organisation models may take half a dozen or more tabs, highlighting features that may include some you weren't fifty-fifty aware of.

For example, the Lexmark Universal v2 driver on my piece of work printer has a tab labeled Watermark, which I had never paid attention to. Borer the tab launches a dialog box from which you lot can add together a watermark (such as Confidential, Draft, or a timestamp) to i or all of the pages you are printing. Another tab on the Lexmark commuter, and on drivers for other printers that support password-protected printing, is named Print and Hold. It allows you to enter a PIN number for a print job and then send the job to the printer; the intended recipient would have to enter the Pin on the printer'due south keypad for the job to exist output.

Tin I Use a Universal Driver?

Most major manufacturers, including merely not limited to Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, and OKI, offer what they call universal printer drivers. Every bit you might suspect, they're not actually universal—they more often than not but work for printers from that manufacturer, and some will merely piece of work for non-PostScript or for monochrome press, for instance. They can be handy, though, if you are networked to, say, a fleet of Blood brother monochrome printers: You don't have to install a carve up commuter for each new printer you add. Microsoft has a universal printer commuter for non-PostScript printers, although setting it upwards can be rather involved. In most cases, going with the model-specific commuter that the manufacturer offers is preferable to a universal commuter.

Accessing Printer Settings on a Mac

Macs take a more streamlined and consequent press interface than Windows systems, and you take extensive control when printing from individual programs. In addition, you can see bones information about your printer, equally well equally change your default printer, from your Mac'due south Printers & Scanners dialog box. With a Mac running High Sierra or other recent versions of macOS, become to Organization Preferences in the Applications folder and click on Printers & Scanners. (With older versions of macOS, the setting is called Impress & Fax.) This opens a panel with a list of installed printers, with the default printer—the last printer used, unless yous have specified another printer—highlighted. You tin can encounter a list of available printers, share your printer to a network, modify the paper size, and check the print queue. Pressing the Options & Supplies push button launches a dialog box with a Commuter tab, which lets you control a express number of settings.

The existent activity, though, is when yous impress from a program. When y'all click Print from the File menu, upwardly pops a Print dialog box, which offers some basic settings (number of copies and media type for example), and a button labeled Presets, which launches a drop-downwards menu with a host of settings for layout, color, paper handling, print quality, and duplex printing. You can use them equally is, or customize and save them.

What Virtually Multifunction Printers?

As devices that do more than impress, multifunction printers (MFPs)—also known equally all-in-ones or AIOs—offering neat versatility, and consolidate within a unmarried motorcar what used to require iii or four devices. Almost all of them browse and copy in addition to printing, and some add fax capabilities besides. All of them have a printer driver, and many have a fax driver you can access every bit well, but you lot seldom volition meet a separate scanner-driver interface with MFPs.

By and large, scanner functions are controlled through manufacturers' browse utilities, which take user-friendly interfaces, or from the MFP's display, whether information technology has a bear on screen or a non-touch screen with function buttons for scanning. Unlike printing, in which yous tin launch a print job from the comfort of your desk, yous have to walk up to a scanner to load the original. Thus, it makes sense that most scanning functions are controlled from within the MFP, which won't even need to be connected to a estimator if it can scan to a USB thumb drive or retentivity card.

Multiply Your Choices

Many users will be fine using the printing interface in a given awarding, and working from its prepare of options. Even so, those choices are often quite limited. Accessing the printer driver—whether through a "Printer Backdrop" or a similarly named link in an application, or through Devices and Printers in your control panel—will present you with a much wider multifariousness of options. A thorough perusal of the driver settings may well reveal features y'all were unaware your printer could even perform.

Once you're done mastering your printer driver, choose your adjacent printer by reading our latest reviews. Y'all tin can as well check out our primer on how to relieve money on printer ink.