Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Wake Up with Windows XP
  • Hour 1. Taking a Bird's-Eye Look at Windows XP
  • Hour 2. Getting Started with Windows XP
  • Hour 3. Managing the Windows XP Interface
  • Part II: Morning Windows Desktop Exploration
  • Hour 4. Working with the My Computer Window
  • Hour 5. Navigating Files with Windows Explorer
  • Hour 6. Calling for Help
  • Hour 7. Improving Your Windows Desktop Experience
  • Part III: Early Afternoon Windows Exploration
  • Hour 8. Installing Programs with Windows XP
  • Hour 9. Finding Files, Folders, and Friends
  • Hour 10. Using the Desktop Accessories
  • Part IV: Late Afternoon Internet Integration
  • Hour 11. Surfing the Web with Internet Explorer
  • Hour 12. Tying Windows into the Web
  • Hour 13. Networking with Windows XP
  • Hour 14. Managing E-mail and Newsgroups with Outlook Express
  • Part V: An Evening with Advanced Windows
  • Hour 15. Exploring Your Hardware Interface
  • Hour 16. Understanding Printing and Fonts
    • Introduction to Spooled Printing
    • Setting Up a Printer
    • The Print Dialog Box
    • Managing Print Jobs
    • Deferred Printing
    • Fonts Have Style
    • Fonts and Typefaces
    • Removing Fonts
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Hour 17. Using Windows on the Road
  • Hour 18. Giving Windows XP a Tune-Up
  • Hour 19. Managing Your Hard Drives
  • Hour 20. Tinkering with the Advanced System Tools
  • Part VI: Having Fun at Nighttime
  • Hour 21. Using Media Player
  • Hour 22. Picturing Windows XP Graphics
  • Hour 23. Making Movies with Windows XP
  • Hour 24. Advanced Windows XP Tips
  • Part VII: Appendixes
  • Appendix A. Differences Between the Windows Home and Professional Edition
  • Appendix B. Glossary
  • Appendix C. Answers to Quizzes

The Print Dialog Box

When you print from an application such as WordPad, you'll see the Print dialog box shown in Figure 16.4. The Print dialog box contains several options from which you can choose. Most of the time, the default option values are appropriate, so you'll simply press Enter to select the OK command button when printing.

Figure 16.4 The Print dialog box controls the way a print job is routed.

The Print dialog box contains a drop-down list box of every printer you've added to Windows. The default printer will be the printer you've chosen using the Add Printer Wizard's final screen. To change the default printer to another printer so that Windows automatically routes output to it when you print (unless you select another printer at printing time), right-click the printer's icon from within the Printers dialog box in My Computer and choose Set as Default.

The Print range will be All if you want to print all pages. For example, if you are printing 20 pages from a word processor, the All option sends all 20 pages to the printer. If you select the Pages option, you can enter a starting page number and ending page number to print only a portion of the document.

The Copies section determines how many copies you want to print. The default is one copy, but you can request an additional number of copies. If you enter a number greater than 1, check the Collate option if you want the pages collated (you usually do). If you highlight part of the text before beginning the print process, you can click the Selection option button to print only the selected text.

For special print jobs, you can click the Properties command button to display a printer Properties dialog box. Each printer model supports a different set of options so each printer's Properties dialog box contains different options. In the Properties dialog box, you specify the type of paper in the printer's paper tray, the orientation (the direction the printed output appears on the paper), and the printer resolution (the higher the printer resolution, the better your output looks, but the longer the printer takes to print a single page), among other options that your printer might support.

Keep in mind that the output goes to the print spooler and not directly to the printer. The next section explains how you can manage the print spooler.

Explorer and Open dialog boxes all display documents, as you've seen throughout this book. If you want to print a document, such as a bitmap graphics document file, a text document file, or a word processing document file, the right-click menu contains a Print command that automatically prints the selected document (or documents) that you right-click over. The right-click does not produce the Print dialog box described in this section; rather, Windows automatically and instantly prints one copy of the document on the primary default printer.

There's one more way to print documents that works well in some situations. If you have the My Computer window open or if you are using Windows Explorer, you can print any printable document by dragging it to any printer icon inside the Printers window. Windows automatically begins printing the document that you drag to the printer icon.

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