spring into Windows XP Service Pack 2 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Use Two Printers, One Device

Using two printers for one device can be a great advantage when you want to quickly make several changes to the way a job is printed. Most of today's printers support a wide array of options for paper tray, page size, page orientation, half-toning, print optimization, and so on. For example, one change that I regularly make to print settings is to use photo-quality output and 3x5 photo-quality paper rather than 8¹/2x11 plain paper. And even though the Properties dialog box interface makes it relatively easy to change such printer settings, it can be a little time-consuming to frequently switch back and forth.

But instead of having to keep track of the print settings each time I send something to printer, I have set up two printers, one called Photo Printer, and one called Text Printer. I then configure word processing applications to use one of the printers and photo applications like Adobe Photo Album to use the other. The magic is this: I retrieve all finished output from the same device. Cool.

What's more, this configuration retains oodles of flexibility. I can always switch an application's printer (and thus, the output settings) for any particular job by simply selecting the alternate printer in the application's Print dialog box. This way, all I have to think about when printing is loading the right paper. At any rate, to add and configure a second printer instance, follow these steps:

Follow these steps again to add other instances as needed, configuring their print properties as required. Before long, you end up with this: a Properties dialog box that lists multiple printers for a single port, as shown in Figure 8-9.