Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Managing Printouts

After you’ve used the Print command, you can either sit there until the paper emerges from the printer, or you can manage the printouts-in-waiting. That option is attractive primarily to people who do a lot of printing, have connections to a lot of printers, or share printers with many other people.

Start by opening the printer’s window. If you’re already in the process of printing, just click the printer’s Dock icon. If not, open →System Preferences→Print & Scan, click the printer’s name, and then click Open Print Queue.

At this point, you see something like Figure 9-4: The printouts that will soon be sliding out of your printer appear in a tidy list.

Figure 9-4. Waiting printouts appear in this window. You can sort the list by clicking the column headings (Name or Status), make the columns wider or narrower by dragging the column-heading dividers horizontally, or reverse the sorting order by clicking the column name a second time. The Supply Level button opens a graph that shows how much ink each cartridge has remaining (certain printer models only).

Here are some of the ways in which you can control these waiting printouts, which Apple collectively calls the print queue:

• Delete them. By clicking an icon, or -clicking several, and then clicking the Delete toolbar button, ...