The improvements to Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional's printing and font features are subtle but nevertheless a boon for you. The core set of features remains largely unchanged. Yet, finding and installing printers is easier. Documents print exactly as expected. Colors look the same on paper as they do onscreen. Innovative features such as OpenType fonts and Internet Printing make the operating system a document-producing machine.
Experienced users such as you will be immediately comfortable with routine tasks such as adding printers, printing documents, and managing fonts. Therefore, after providing an overview of these routine tasks, this chapter focuses on nuances that are a bit obscure or are not immediately obvious. In this chapter, you learn how to search your organization for printers that suit your needs. You learn how to print documents over the Internet. Also, you learn how to troubleshoot printer problems that afflict users in various situations.
Whether you're connecting to a local or network printer, you must install the drivers for that printer. Local printers are those that you physically attach to your computer. Network printers are those attached to a network server or attached to the network via internal or external network adapters.
Either way, there are three different ways to install printer drivers: allowing Plug and Play to detect the printer, using the Add Printer Wizard, or using Point and Print to install a network printer.
The requirements for installing local printers are similar to installing any other hardware, except for installing network printers:
In most cases, you don't have to log on to the computer as an Administrator to install a network printer or any printer for which Windows 2000 Professional provides drivers. To install a local printer using drivers that the operating system does not provide, you must log on to the computer as an Administrator, however.
In order to install a network printer, you must have appropriate permissions. To connect to a network printer requires that the printer's administrator gave you permission to do so, either implicitly through a group that's in the printer's access control list (ACL) or explicitly by adding your account to the printer's ACL.
Note
When two or more users share a computer, each user must individually install printers. If I install a printer, for example, other users won't see that same printer when they log on to the computer and install it themselves. On a nicer note, users will never have to log on as an Administrator in order to install a printer after someone else installs it because the drivers will already be available on the computer.
See Also
Chapter 3, "Configuring Hardware," to learn more about when you must log on to the computer as an Administrator in order to install new hardware.
Chapter 11, "Securing Your Computer," for more information about access control lists.
Installing local printers isn't any different from installing them in Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 or Microsoft Windows 98. Windows 2000 Professional automatically detects and configures thousands of Plug and Play printers, so check the Printers folder to make sure the printer isn't already installed. If it's not already installed, use Add Printer Wizard in the Printers folder under Control Panel:
In Control Panel, double-click the Printers icon and then double-click the Add Printer icon.
In Add Printer Wizard, click Next, click Local printer, and then click Next again.
Add Printer Wizard first searches for any Plug and Play printers. If it doesn't find any, click Next to manually install the printer; pick the printer port, select a printer driver, and choose whether you want to share the printer.
After installing a local printer, you can share it with other users on the network. To share a printer, you must have Manage Printer rights on the computer. Click Sharing on the printer icon's shortcut menu, click Shared as, and then type a name for the printer. Other ways to configure printer sharing include the following:
If you want to make the printer particularly easy for other users to find, select the List in the Directory check box, which only applies if you connect to a network that uses Active Directory.
When other users connect to your printer, if they're also using Windows 2000 Professional, they don't have to provide drivers for it because the operating system downloads the drivers from your computer. If you want users of other operating systems to be able to use the printer, however, you can install additional drivers for them; click Additional Drivers to do so.
If you want to control which users can access the printer, click the Security tab of the printer Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 6.1. Then, do one of following:
Click Add to add a user or group, whether local or domain, to the printer's ACL.
Click the name of a user or group and then click Remove to remove it from the ACL.
Click the name of a user or group and then select the check boxes corresponding the permissions you want to assign to it in the Permissions list. You can explicitly allow or deny Print, Manage Printers, and Manage Documents permissions for each user or group. If you want to have finer control over the printer's ACL, click Advanced.
See Also
Chapter 11, "Securing Your Computer," to learn more about managing access control for printers, files, and folders.
You can choose between two different ways to install network printers. The simplest way is to locate the printer in the My Network Places folder and then click Connect on its shortcut menu. The operating system installs the printers' drivers and associates them with the appropriate network share automatically, usually requiring no user interaction at all.
If you prefer, you can use Add Printer Wizard to install a network printer. In Add Printer Wizard, click Type the printer name or click Next to browse for a printer. Then, type the UNC name of a printer on the network (UNC names look like \servernameprintername) or click Next and browse for a printer on the Browse For Printer page. Searching the directory is useful if you're connected to a network that Windows 2000 Server manages and you can't locate the printer you want to use. In that case, if the printer is listed in Active Directory, you can easily search for the printer as follows:
In Control Panel, double-click the Printers icon and then double-click the Add Printer icon.
In Add Printer Wizard, click Next, click Network printer, and then click Next.
On the Locate Your Printer page, click Find a printer in the Directory and then click Next.
In Find Printers, provide as much information as you can about the printer for which you're searching on the following tabs and then click Find Now. If you don't provide any information on any of these tabs, the operating system displays all of the printers listed in Active Directory:
Printers . Type the printers' name, location, or model. All this information is optional and usually not necessary if your organization has only a few printers. If it has a lot of printers, be as descriptive as you can so the list will be shorter.
Features . Describe the features for which you're looking: double-sided printing, color printing, stapling, paper size, minimum resolution, and minimum speed.
Advanced . Search for printers based on any of the fields that describe printers in the Active Directory. Fields for which you can search include Asset Number, Owner Name, Paper Available, and Web Page Address.
On the Printers tab shown in Figure 6.2, choose which printer you want to install. Click Connect on its shortcut menu.
Figure 6.2. If you don't provide any search parameters, Add Printer Wizard displays all printers listed in Active Directory.
Note
Using Active Directory, administrators have a fair amount of control over printers. They can automatically install printers for you or they can prevent printers from being listed in the directory. For more information about these capabilities, see Inside Windows 2000 Server, published by New Riders.
Internet printing is a hot new feature that I think has a lot of potential—but not yet. The idea is that it's an alternative to faxing, e-mailing, or sending documents via overnight mail. Imagine being able to make reservations at your favorite hotel by printing them. Imagine printing documents at the office while you're on the road. It's a great idea that's going to take awhile to develop because using a printer over the Internet requires companies to prepare their servers and publish those addresses.
Internet printing is based on a new protocol, Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). IPP creates remote procedure call (RPC) connections to printers over the Internet.
Installing or printing to an Internet printer is really no different from any network printer. In Add Printer Wizard, click Network printer, click Next, click Connect to a printer on the Internet or on your intranet, and type the printer's URL in URL. Essentially, you provide a URL instead of a UNC name. After installing an Internet printer using Add Printer Wizard, it downloads the drivers from the Internet, installs the printer, and you're ready to go. After you installed the printer, printing to it is no different from printing to any other printer, which you learn about later in this chapter.
Note
In order for a printer to be accessible via the Internet, it must be attached to a server computer running Windows 2000 Server that's accessible from the Internet. Also, Internet Information Services (IIS) must be running on the server and the administrator must install and share the printer.
You can view information about Internet printers over the Internet. Open the printer's URL to see its status. Open http://servername/printers to see all the printers that are available over the Internet on that server. An easier way to view a printer's status is to double-click its icon in the Printers folder, however. This is the same user interface you're already accustomed to
using.
The following sections discuss printer queues, printer preferences, and printing documents.
Managing a printer's queue is no different from earlier versions of Windows. In the Printers folder, double-click the printer to open its queue. When you open the printer queue, you see a list of the documents that are printing or are queued to print. Click any document to select it and then do one of the following:
To pause a document, click Pause on the Document menu.
To print a paused document, click Resume on the Document menu.
To restart a document from the beginning, click Restart on the Document menu.
To cancel a document, click Pause on the Document menu.
To view a document's properties, click Properties on the Document menu.
This command allows you to change the document's priority, schedule when the document prints, and view the document's printing preferences.
The remaining commands apply to all of the documents in the queue. These are available only if you have Manage Printers permission for the printer, which you probably have if you installed the printer locally and probably don't have if you're using a network printer. To pause the printer, for example, click Pause Printing on the Printer menu. To cancel all print jobs, click Cancel All Documents on the Document menu.
If you're using more than one printer, make sure you select the one that you want to use as the default. To do so, in the Printers folder, click Set as Default Printer on its shortcut menu. That way, output automatically goes to that printer if you don't select a printer.
More preferences are available than just setting the default printer. Click Printing Preferences to configure things such as default paper orientation and quality. The first tab of the printer Printing Preferences dialog box allows you to change the orientation of the paper, whether it prints on both sides of the paper; as well as the page order, front-to-back or back-to-front. On this tab, click Advanced to set printer-specific options. The next tab, Paper/Quality, allows you to choose the paper source or tray. Note that the options that are available on this dialog box are different, depending on the driver you installed. One printer's driver might include just a few basic options, whereas another printer's driver will include several different options.
On a printer's shortcut menu, click Properties to configure the printer. The options here are a bit more administrative than printing preferences, which describe how you want documents to print. For example, you can configure the printer share, determine when the printer is available, set the printer's ACL to control which users or groups can use and manage the printer, and set device settings such as printer memory. However, once you've installed and shared a printer, there aren't that many good reasons to spend much time configuring a printer because the default settings are usually preferable. Note that you must have Manage Printers permission for the printer to change any of these settings.
To print a document in most applications, click Print on the File menu. The application then displays the Print dialog box. Although some applications do modify the Print dialog box, most don't. Figure 6.3 shows what it looks like. In the Select Printer list, you see the same icons that you see in the Printers folder: one icon for each printer to which you can print and the Add Printer icon. If you forgot to install the printer you want to use, you don't have to go back to the Printers folder—just double-click the Add Printer icon to install it. If you'd rather search the directory for a printer, click Find Printer, which opens the Find Printers window (refer to "Network Printers" earlier in this chapter). All other options on this dialog box are the same as in earlier versions of Windows, including Windows 98.
Figure 6.3. The Layout and Paper/Quality tabs allow you to adjust printing preferences for this document only.
Other ways you can print documents include these:
On a program's File menu, click Print.
On a document's shortcut menu, click Print.
Drag a printer icon from the Printers folder to your desktop to create a shortcut for it and then drag a document to the shortcut.
Drag a printer icon from the Printers folder to your SendTo folder, which is UserProfileSendTo. Click Send To on a document's shortcut menu and click the name of the printer.
OpenType fonts are the latest addition to Windows 2000 Professional's collection of fonts. OpenType is a standard that Microsoft developed in conjunction with Adobe, combining technologies such as TrueType and Type 1, which brings the benefits of those fonts to all platforms. New features, including subsetting and font-compression, make OpenType fonts particularly applicable to the Internet, and more specifically the Web, because they're quicker to download and look good in a Web browser. To ensure an OpenType font's integrity, each is digitally signed. (Signatures are available only for OpenType fonts and, in fact, if a font doesn't have a digital signature, it's not an OpenType font.) Getting that digital signature requires that the font pass tests to verify the integrity of its hinting algorithms, suggesting a good-looking font.
In Windows 2000 Professional, managing fonts is not unlike other versions of Windows. You install, remove, and preview fonts the same way. The following sections show you how to perform those tasks and describe any problems you might encounter.
See Also
Chapter 9, "Using Multiple Languages," to learn more about Windows 2000 Professional's single set of worldwide binaries. Each language edition of the operating system comes with at least one font that enables you to write documents using any language supported by the operating system.
Fonts are in SystemRootFonts, but you can also view them in Control Panel. In Control Panel, double-click the Fonts icon. Installing a font is as simple as dragging the font file to this folder. Windows 2000 Professional automatically installs the font and adds the appropriate information to the registry. Other ways that you can install a font include the following:
At the MS-DOS command prompt, copy the font file to the Fonts folder. If Microsoft Windows Explorer isn't open when you do this, Windows 2000 Professional won't register the font until after you restart the computer.
With the Fonts folder open, click Install New Font on the File menu. Using this command doesn't make sense because it's more complicated than simply dragging the font file to the Fonts folder.
Administrators can install additional fonts via answer files, which are scripts that allow you to install Windows 2000 Professional with little or no interaction.
To remove a font, simply delete the file from the Fonts folder. Windows 2000 Professional automatically cleans up the font's settings from the registry.
See Also
Chapter 1, "Installing Windows," to learn more about answer files and how to write them.
Within the Fonts folder, you can view a sample of any font by double- clicking its icon. The window that Windows Explorer displays describes the type of font, whether it's signed, its typeface name, file size, version, and copyright information. It also displays a basic set of characters and the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890" at various sizes so you can get an idea of what the font looks like. What it doesn't do, and I wish it did, is display a list of each character in the font. This would be particularly handy if you use any of the symbol fonts, such as WingDings.