Chapter 14: Printing and Faxing

Managing Printer Activity

Most print jobs don't require any management on your part: You tell your computer to print a document, it sends the job to a printer, and you pick up the printed pages after they are done. Occasionally, however, you want to communicate with a printer while it is in the act of printing. For example, you may realize that you have told the printer to print a full hundred-page document when you only intended to print one page of it. Or you may have queued several print jobs and realize that you want them printed in a different order, or that you want to cancel a job and send it to a different printer.

You deal with these situations from the printer's Print Control window, shown in Figure 14-4. Open this window by opening the printer's icon in the Printers And Faxes folder. (Or, if you are displaying the Control Panel as a menu, you can open the printer by selecting Start | Control Panel | Printers and Faxes | printer name.) The printer control window shows you what job is currently printing, how that job is progressing, and which jobs are waiting to be printed.

Figure 14-4: The Print Control window

Pausing or Canceling Print Jobs

To suspend the current print job until you can figure out what you want to do with it, choose Printer | Pause Printing from the menu of the Print Control window (or right-click the document in the Print Control window and choose Pause Printing from the shortcut menu). To resume the job where you left off, select Printer | Pause Printing again (or right-click anywhere in the Print Control window and choose Pause Printing). To delete a particular print job, right-click the job in the Print Control window and choose Cancel from the shortcut menu that appears. To get rid of everything waiting for that printer, choose Printer | Cancel All Documents.

Changing the Order in Which Jobs Are Printed

By default, print jobs are executed in a first-in-first-out manner. However, print jobs also have priority settings and the highest priority jobs move to the front of the queue. If you are printing a number of jobs and want to move one of them in front of the others, change its priority as follows:

1. Open the printer's icon in the Printers And Faxes folder. The Print Control window appears, as shown in Figure 14-4. The jobs waiting to be printed are listed.
2. Right-click the print job whose priority you want to change and select Properties from the shortcut menu.
3. The default priority is 1, which is the setting for the least important jobs. (This takes some getting used to, as we usually think of "first priority" being the most important.) Move the priority slider to the right to raise the job's priority.
4. Click OK.

Scheduling a Print Job

If you have a very large print job that is going to take a long time, you can schedule it to print in the middle of the night or some other time when the printer is unlikely to be needed by anyone. To do this, submit your job to the printer as usual, but then do the following:

1. Open the printer's icon in the Printers And Faxes folder. The Print Control window appears, as shown in Figure 14-4.
2. Right-click the print job you want to schedule and select Properties from the shortcut menu. The Document Properties dialog box appears.
3. Click the Only From xx To xx radio button.
4. Select times from the drop-down lists so that the radio button corresponds to a complete sentence--for example: Only From 2 a.m. To 5 a.m.
5. Click OK.

If you have scheduled a large print job for a time when the printer is unattended, make sure that it has plenty of paper and a fresh cartridge of ink or toner.