Printer Properties Versus Printing Properties

Two types of properties are covered in this chapter: printer properties and printing preferences. The distinction isn’t obvious from the terminology, so here’s a general description to help you understand the difference:

• Printer properties: These properties apply to the printer itself, such as the way it is connected to the computer, whether and how it is shared on the network, the way the computer sends information to the printer, when the printer is available, and more.
• Printing preferences: These properties apply to how the printer creates a printed document, including such features as paper source, paper size, duplex printing, paper quality settings, print scaling, watermarks, and other document output properties.

In a way, you can think of printer properties as related to how the printer prints all documents, and printing preferences as related to how the printer prints specific documents. That’s not 100 percent accurate, but it should begin to help you understand the distinction between the two.

If you are a typical Windows user, you will be more likely to spend time configuring printing properties than printer properties. If you are a power user or administrator, however, you’ll no doubt spend some time configuring printer properties to control how the printer operates.

Before diving into printer and printing preferences, you need to get your printer installed. That’s covered in the following section.