Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Printing, Faxing, Fonts, & Graphics

The Macintosh may be only the 8 percent solution in the mainstream business world, but in the graphics and printing industries, it’s the 800-pound gorilla. You’d better believe that when Apple designed Mac OS X, it worked very hard to keep its graphics and printing fans happy.

This chapter tackles printing, faxing, fonts, graphics, ColorSync, and PDF files, which Mac OS X uses as an everyday exchange format—one of the biggest perks in Mac OS X.

Mac Meets Printer

One of the most attractive features of Snow Leopard is that it takes up so much less space on your hard drive. Overall, this operating system is half the size of the previous version.

As it turns out, though, a substantial chunk of that savings comes from printer drivers. Mac OS X used to come preloaded with the printing software for every conceivable printer model from every conceivable printer company—Epson, HP, Lexmark, Canon, and others, several gigabytes’ worth. Clearly, most people wound up with about 900 wads of printing software they’d never use.

When you install Snow Leopard, though, you get only the printer drivers for the printers you actually have, or are nearby on the network. If you ever encounter a different printer model later, Mac OS X downloads it for you on the spot.

Note

If you don’t have an Internet connection, you can also install all those hundreds of other drivers from the Snow Leopard DVD. Just click Customize on the first screen of the installer, as described ...