Printing with MAC OS X 10.2+
There can be a lot of confusion and difficulty printing in Mac OSX. Below are the problems and solutions I found to print pages and make PDFs.
My Problems
Epson 860 printer was not able
to print the same large area of 8.5 x 11 sheets that was available in
OS9.
HP LaserJet 4V would not print at all.
New HP Print drivers finally worked. But it would also create PS
files that would not distill, PDFs were rotated or did not fill the
paper correctly. And finally... what happened to those nice small
.17" margins?
Solutions
Half the problem with OSX printing is the Page Setup & Print dialog implementation.
Default Paper Sizes: The default letter size margins are maybe OK for printing text...but for photos and drawing one would like to use a much of the paper as our printers will allow. For a long while I printed in classic just to get .17" margins on letter size. With OS9 some of us hacked PPDs to adjust paper sizes and choices...and creating PDFs with sheet sizes larger than our printers maximum required virtual printers.
OSX Custom Paper Sizes: The
solution to many paper size and margin problems is creating custom
paper sizes.
Format for: "Any Printer" in the Page setup dialog & Settings:
"Custom Pager Size"
This opens the custom paper dialog. Here you can create your own page size definitions. The Custom page sizes become available in all applications and printers (beats hacking the PPDs)...And very useful for creating PDFs with paper sizes beyond your printer.
But the Epson 860 driver appears to reject my custom sizes and wants to print the default Letter size? Fortunately using the Gimp-Print driver for Epson 860 succesfully uses custom sizes...so my photos once again fill the page.
But here is what's buggy. If I reopen the Page Set up dialog. The setting says "Letter" even though my choice was the custom "8.5x11" and if I click "OK"...the size slips back to the unwanted Default Letter size and margins, even though I left the settings unchanged. The custom setting doesn't stick. Fortunately, If I leave the Page Setup Dailog alone after selecting my custom size, then the page size does not revert to the default "Letter".
The hacker in me wants to rewrite the default pages sizes so that only my "Custom" sizes appear. Maybe even the Epson driver would work then?
The HP Driver for 4V: This was my other big problem. Pages wouldn't print. I finally chose the OS9 PPD, by using "Other" in the printer configuration dialog (Not "HP"). This allowed me to select the OS9 HP 4MV PPD. This worked until I tried to make some PostScript files with it and they would not distill. Supposedly, HP fixed their OSX driver , it will print with the 4V but I still had problems with the postscript option.
So the next big problem with OSX was creating quality PDFs.
PDFs with OSX
Creating PDFs in OSX looked easy (no Distiller and Acrobat needed). But a careful look at OSX pdfs revealed that they are always larger than Acrobat's and their diagonal lines are thicker than they should be (square pen vs roung pen). The size factor adds up when sending multipage PDFs by email and the thicker diagonal lines are just sloppy. You can see an example here: Creating Distiller PDFs in MAC OSX.
This page also describes how to create a "virtual" localhost printer for creating Postscript files. I've discovered that using the "Generic PostScript Printer" for creating PS files (to be distilled) seems to work well for me and creating custom sizes (as in discussion above) frees me from needing a to chose a printer model that has the specific page sizes I need.
So, in a way, after months, things seem to be getting simpler again. The "Generic Postscript driver" even seems to work with my 4MV. And I'm able to successfully create postscript & PDF 36x24 sizes with the LaserWriter 4V printer, generic postscript driver and custom page sizes. Goodbye "localhost"? And I'm back to two printers.
Be warned about another little gotcha though --it sometimes makes a differences which landscape icon is selected in the Page Setup dialog. Why are there two anyway?
Some Print Dialog Dissappointments? What's the use of saving settings in the Print dialog if changing them doesn't change any settings? Hopefully this will be fixed. The print settings are spread over many slow opening dialogs but you have the option of saving the settings. However changing the presets to a saved one does not necessarily change the settings of the multiple panes. So printing a page and then printing a postcript file requires too much playing around in the settings. Too bad the presets function doesn't work. How nice to would be if I could just select the Printer and a Preset (Standard,PostScript, PDF, etc.) and not have reenter "Output Options" all the time.
SUMMARY
1. Use Custom Pages to create
your own paper choices for printing and PDFs.
2. Use Gimp-Print with older Epson printers to get back control of
page sizes and margins.
3. If your HP postscript printer is giving you problems, try the
"Generic Postscript Driver"
4. If you want smaller, high quality PDFs, you'll need Adobe Acrobat
or MacGhostView and maybe a virtual printer.
Mac OSX Printing seems on the verge of becoming a better printing system than OS9. Custom Sheets and integration with PostScript and PDF creation are definite improvements. And those PDFs are making it easier to share documents & drawings with Clients and Print Shops.
Obviously Epson and HP have had problems creating OSX drivers for their older printers. And Acrobat still seems to produce better PDFs (and I like bookmarking multi page PDFs)...hopefully MacOSX is going to further improve its own PDF processes.
WISHLIST
1. Speed up the print dialog
& dialogs everywhere.
2. Fix the saved presets so that changing the preset actually changes
ALL the settings to the saved state.
3. Make custom pages "stick" in the Page Setup Dialog and allow users
to edit the default page sizes and margins.
4. Fix the "thickened" diagonal lines in Mac PDF creation. And maybe
get the sizes down to something comparable to Distiller or
Macps2pdf.
5. Epson, get the OSX drivers to respect Custom Sheet
sizes.