How to Print a Document on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Setting up a printer for your Mac OS X Snow Leopard is as easy as plugging it into one of your Mac’s USB ports. The steps required to print a document are just as straightforward. To print from within any application using the default page characteristics — standard 8 1/2-x-11 inch paper, portrait mode, no scaling — follow these steps:

Before you print, preview! Click Preview, and Mac OS X opens the Preview application to show you what the printed document will look like. (Some upstart programs have their own built-in Print Preview mode thumbnails within the Print dialog.) When you’re done examining your handiwork, close the Preview application to return to your document.

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Within your application, click File and choose Print or press the Command+P keyboard shortcut.

Mac OS X displays the simple version of the Print dialog. (To display all the fields, click the button with the down arrow next to the Printer pop-up menu.) Some applications use their own custom Print dialogs, but you should see the same general settings.

Click in the Copies field and enter the number of copies that you need.

You can also enable or disable collation, just as you can with those oh-so-fancy copiers.

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Decide what you want to print.

To print the entire document, use the default Pages radio button setting of All. To print a range of selected pages, select the From radio button and enter the starting and ending pages.

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(Optional) Choose application-specific printing parameters.

Each Mac OS X application provides different panes so that you can configure settings specific to that application. You don’t have to display any of these extra settings to print a default document, but the power is there to change the look dramatically when necessary. To display these settings, click the pop-up menu in the center of the Print dialog and choose one of these panes. For example, if you’re printing from the Address Book, you can choose the Address Book entry from the pop-up menu and elect to print a phone list or an e-mail list.

Click the Print button.

Of course, there are more settings and more functionality to the printing system, but this short introduction to printing will likely suffice for 90% of Mac owners.