Chapter II.8. Printing for Posterity

In This Chapter

  • Setting up Page Setup

  • Preparing to print

  • Printing your document just right

Printers are just amazing today. Not only do they print all your beautifully crafted documents, but some of them scan and fax, too. Yet others can show you previews of photos before printing them, and even some even work wirelessly without being connected physically to your computer! The good news is that whether your printer is a desktop model or a big, fancy networked behemoth, your Word documents can come out just the way you like.

When it comes to printing, Word and Mac OS X interact with each other to a high degree. When Word opens, it checks to see what the default printer is and what its capabilities are. When you open or create a document in Word, some of the Page Setup options are determined by the default printer's capabilities. The same document may have slightly different page breaks when opened on a computer with a different default printer. Some printers can print edge-to-edge, but others can't. Word is smart; it reformats your document to the current default printer, which is why a document can look a little different from one computer to another.

The choices you're offered when you print a document depend upon the printer's brand, model, and printer driver version that's installed. Certain options are available only if your printer supports them. These include duplex (printing on both sides of a sheet of paper), booklet layout, full bleed (edge ...

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