Specifications

Many printer drivers include a Fonts page that lets you control how the driver treats the TrueType
fonts in the documents you print. The usual options are as follows:
■ Download TrueType Fonts as Outline Soft Fonts. Causes the driver to send the fonts to the printer
as vector outlines so the printer can rasterize them into bitmaps of the proper size. This option
generally provides the fastest performance.
■ Download TrueType Fonts as Bitmap Soft Fonts. Causes the driver to rasterize the fonts in the com-
puter and send the resulting bitmaps to the printer. This option is slightly slower than sending
the font outlines but uses less printer memory.
■ Print TrueType as Graphics. Causes the driver to rasterize the fonts into bitmaps and send them
to the printer as graphic images. This is the slowest of the three options, but it enables you to
overlap text and graphics without blending them.
The Device options provided by many printer drivers enable you to specify values for the following
options:
■ Print Quality. Enables you to select the level of text quality for your documents. Lower qualities
print faster but have a coarser appearance.
■ Printer Memory. Enables you to specify how much memory is installed in the printer. The setting
displays the amount of memory that ships with the printer, but if you install additional mem-
ory, be sure to modify this setting. This setting is used by the Printer Memory Tracking feature
(see the following option) to calculate compression and the likelihood of the print job being
completed successfully.
■ Printer Memory Tracking. Enables you to control how aggressively the printer driver will use the
amount of memory configured in the printer memory parameter. When it processes a print job,
the driver computes the amount of printer memory needed and compares it to the amount
installed in the printer. If the job requires a great deal more memory than the printer has, it will
abort the job and generate an error message. When the amount of memory required is close to
the amount installed, this setting determines whether the driver will attempt to send the job to
the printer, at the risk of incurring an out-of-memory error, or behave conservatively by abort-
ing the job.
Inkjet printers often feature a Main page that enables you to specify resolution, paper type (plain,
photo-quality, transparency), resolution, ink (black or colors), and color adjustments. The Utility page
enables you to clean the nozzles, align the nozzles, and check for clogged nozzles on many models.
Tip
If you use an inkjet printer (or use the fold-down straight-through paper path on some laser printers), your pages are
stacked in reverse order. Some printers offer an “ordered printing” or “reverse order” option that enables you to print a
multipage document last page first. This produces a properly stacked document in the printer output tray.
Make sure you enable this feature in either the printer properties sheet or with the printer setup in your application, but not
in both places. Enable it in both places, and they cancel out each other.
Printer Sharing via a Network
Windows 9x, Windows Me, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 enable you to share local printers with
other users on a Windows network. To do this, you must explicitly create a share representing the
printer from the Sharing page of its Properties dialog box. On this page, you specify a NetBIOS name
that will become the share name for the printer and a password if you want to limit access to certain
users.