MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Connecting and Sharing a Printer

Nine times out of ten — it’s probably more like 99 times out of 100 — connecting a printer to MacBook Air is a no-brainer: You plug it in to the USB port, turn it on, and presto! MacBook Air and your printer have already become fast friends and you can start printing right away. How can you be sure? You can tell in a couple of ways:

In any application that supports printing, choose File →Print. In the dialog that appears, you should see your printer’s name in the Printer list.

You can also display the list of connected printers from any application that supports printing. Choose File →Printer, open the Printers list, and then select Add Printer.

Click System Preferences in the Dock, and then click Print & Scan. In the Print & Scan preferences that appear, you should see your printer’s name in the Printers list, as shown in Figure 1.13.

Surprisingly, Windows doesn’t have a monopoly on annoying behavior. One of the senseless things that OS X does is set the default printer to whatever printer you used or added most recently. To fix this, choose ...