This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Print Options
The Print dialog box (Figure 3.11) presents you with a large collection of choices that determine the details of how your document prints. Although you can usually accept the default values for these options, sometimes you'll need to change some of them.
The Macintosh and Windows versions of this dialog box look superficially different, but the Acrobat-specific controls are entirely identical. The dialog boxes differ only in the controls that are standard to the two environments' Print dialog boxes. For example, at the top of the Macintosh version of this dialog box (Figure 3.13) are pop-up menus for Presets and Option categories, whereas Windows has printer status text and a Properties button.
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Figure 3.13 The Macintosh Print dialog box has Macstandard controls at the top, but otherwise it has the same Acrobat-specific controls in Windows.
Let's look at the controls and see how they affect your print job. Note that the dialog box's Preview always reflects the controls' current settings:
Printer controls
- Printer Name. This is the standard pop-up menu of printers available to your computer. Choose the printer on which you want to print.
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Comments and Forms. This pop-up menu lets you specify whether annotations and form field contents should be printed along with the document pages (Figure 3.14).
Figure 3.14 The Comments and Forms pop-up menu lets you decide whether to print the contents of annotations and form fields.
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Print-range controls
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All, Current view, Current page, Pages. These four radio buttons choose the pages within your document that you want to print. They're self-explanatory, with one possible exception: The Pages text field (Figure 3.15) can accept a hyphen to indicate a contiguous range of pages and commas to separate discontinuous pages. Thus, 1-4 prints pages 1 through 4, and 1,4,7 prints pages 1, 4, and 7.
Figure 3.15 The Pages text field accepts hyphens to indicate a contiguous range of pages and commas to separate, individual pages.
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Subset. This pop-up menu allows you to choose to print even pages, odd pages, or both (Figure 3.16). It's useful for manually printing duplex documents.
Figure 3.16 The Subset pop-up menu allows you to print even, odd, or all pages.
- Reverse pages. Acrobat prints the pages in reverse order. This is convenient if your printer delivers its pages face-up; the stack of output ends up in correct order.
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Page-handling controls
- Copies. Specify the number of copies you want of each page.
- Collate. If you print multiple copies of a document, the pages are collated.
Page Scaling. This menu lets you resize the document pages in a variety of ways (Figure 3.17). The most routinely useful selections are as follows:
- None prints the document in its native size; this is usually what you want.
- Shrink to Printable Area shrinks the page so it fits within the printer's native printable area. This ensures items near the edges of your pages (such as headers and footers) print successfully.
- Fit to Printable Area shrinks or expands the page so it fits within the printer's native printable area. This makes the document page as large as it can be without losing information off the edges of the paper (Figure 3.18).
Figure 3.17 The Page Scaling menu tells Acrobat to scale the document pages at print time in a variety of useful ways.
Figure 3.18 Fit to Printable Area scales the page up or down until it exactly fits within the current paper.
We'll look at other selections in this menu later in this chapter.
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Auto-Rotate and Center. This option repositions the page so it's centered on the paper (Figure 3.19). It may also rotate the page if Acrobat thinks it's necessary (usually not). This may be useful if you want to center a small document page on a large piece of paper.
Figure 3.19 Auto-Rotate and Center moves the contents of the document page so they're centered on the paper.
- Choose Paper Source by PDF page size (Windows). This option overrides the printer's default paper size and uses each page's paper size as specified in the PDF file. It's useful if you have a document whose pages vary in size and a printer with multiple paper trays; Acrobat selects paper from whichever tray most closely matches the page's size.
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