Printing Defaults

[Thomas M.]

I don't know where else to pose this question, so I thought that I would try
this newsgroup.

I'm in the process of writing up some basic instructions regarding printers
for my organization. There is a lot of confusion among users regarding
printer settings and my document is an attempt to address that problem. So
I've documented how settings on the printer, printing preferences, and
document settings impact a print job, and which setting take precedent. I
wanted to do a section on the printing defaults (Available from the Advanced
tab in the printer properties), but I'm having a hard time figuring out
those settings.

What I've found thus far is that the printing defaults apply to all users
who connect to the printer, which is exactly what I expected and makes
perfect sense. I'm a network administrator and I have the Manage Printers
permission, so I can go in and change the printing defaults on any printer.
My problem is that those settings don't seem to have any effect.

For example, I set the printing defaults for one printer so that the first
page of a document would come out of tray 2 and all other pages would come
out of tray 3. I saved the settings, closed out of the printer properties,
and then went back in to confirm that the settings had been saved (they
were). So I wrote "Tray 2" on the paper in tray 2, and "Tray 3" on the
paper in tray 3 so that I would know which tray the paper came from, and
then I printed a document several pages long. I thought that the first page
would come out of tray 2 and all the other pages would come out of tray 3,
but in fact all the pages came from tray 2. I thought that maybe the
printing defaults got overridden by another group of settings, so I checked
the settings in the document and on the printer, and it appears that there
are no other settings that would supersede the printing defaults. I tried
the same test on another printer with the same results, and then tried a
third printer, but that printer would not save my changes to the printing
defaults.

I used the same document for each test, and each of the 3 printers I have
been working with is an HP 5Si (which are fairly old). I plan on doing the
same test using a different printer model.

Can someone tell me if I am on the right track here? What might have caused
my test to not work as expected? Is my thinking in regards to the role of
the printing defaults correct, or do I have a fundamental misunderstanding
here? What might cause the one printer to be unable to store my changes to
the printing defaults?

Thanks for any help that you can offer.

--Tom

 

[William Stokes]

Hello Tom,

I don't have direct answers to your questions. I've been working with
similar promlem in our network. What I've come to realize is that most
applications don't use admin created default settings even if they actually
are defined as DEFAULT via Advanced settings - Printing Defaults but use the
drivers factory defaults anyway unless the end user, while printing, goes to
print properties and changes to the QuickSet you have defined which
obviously is too demanding for some users...

There are exceptions though. Like Lotus Notes which will use admin specified
defaults without a problem. I don't know how to 'fix' this with other apps.

-Will

 

[Thomas M.]

I don't really care so much about setting the printing defaults. I just
want to understand the issue so that I can document it and explain it to
users. As far as I can tell, the hierarchy seems to be:

Document settings
Application settings
Printing preferences
Printer settings

I suppose that you could add "Page settings" to the top of the list because
different pages within a document can have different settings, and you could
even go to the level of sections within a page, but for simplicity I
consider all of that kind of stuff to be document settings. So all users
get the settings at the printer level if nothing else is set. The user can
override the printer settings by setting preferences. Settings at the
application level will override both printing preferences and printer
settings. And finally, settings at the document level supersede everything.
At least, it seems to me that this is how it works.

--Tom

 

[Bob I]

And just to muck things up a bit more, changing the users Default
printer will cause a document to "adjust itself".