Tips for Using the Ventura Print Dialog

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the Print Dialogue on your Mac. 

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So when you go to print a document or webpage you end up at the Print Dialogue. This is the window attached to the main window that has a set of controls and options that you can set before you print. For instance, here in Pages if I go to File, Print or just Command P it brings up the Print Dialogue. Now in 2022 with the release of macOS Ventura the print dialogue has a whole new look. A big improvement is there is now just one mode. Previously you had a simplified mode and a detailed mode. If you didn't know to switch to the detailed mode you'd wonder where a lot of the options went. But now it is easier to see them all. Notice here the Pages window is still the main active window. The Print Dialogue appears as an overlay on it and is attached to it. So it's kind of its own window but kind of also part of this window. You can actually grab the bottom here and drag down to expand it. 

So if you want to stick to the Basics all you need to do is pay attention to the printer here. If you have more than one printer attached to your Mac or on your network you'll see them all here and you can select which one you want to send the document to. You also have the option to Add Printer or go to Settings. This just takes you to the section in the System Settings where you can do this. You can set the number of copies here if you want to print more than one copy. On the left you can scroll through a preview of the document and see how many pages there are. You can also see it right here. Then if everything looks good you can click the Print button here to print the document. In most cases that is all you need to do. 

Now if you don't want to print all the pages in your document you can control that as well. There are three options. You can print all the pages. You can select a range and then choose from a page number to another page number. You can choose a selection. When you do that each of the pages here has a little circle that you can click to include that page. They don't have to be contiguous. You can click here and you can see it says pages 1 to 3 and 6, or 1-3, 6-7 10 13-14. You can always switch back to All Pages like that and it will still remember the selection you had if you want to go back to it. 

Now most of the rest of the settings depend on three factors. The first one is your printer. For instance my printer is a color printer here and you can see I've got the option to print in color. But, of course, you wouldn't have that option there if you've got a printer that just prints black and white. The second factor is the app that you're using. For instance here the first set of options I see are for Pages. So if I wasn't printing in Pages, if I was printing in another app, I wouldn't see this here. These are specific to the app. Note that each of these sections here can be opened or closed by using the Disclosure Triangle to the left. So I can close or open the Pages section. 

The third factor could be the document you're trying to print. For instance some apps handle various types of documents. Preview can handle pdf's and images and you may see different options here depending on the document type that you've got. Let's scroll down here and you can see under Media & Quality I can select a media type and a quality type and you may see something similar like that for your printer. Under Paper Handling you may also see some settings like this or ones that are a little different for your printer. I've also got Printer Info here at the bottom. It actually shows me the levels of my toner. But your printer may or may not have something that supports displaying that here in the Print Dialogue. 

Now one section you'll see almost all the time is Layout. In this section you can decide to print more than one page per sheet. So pages, actually like a page in your document, where sheet is a piece of paper. So here I've got one page per sheet but look what happens if I switch to two. You could see here it switches to horizontal layout and puts two pages per sheet. Now I've got eight instead of fifteen sheets. It also gets rid of the page selection here. I can't choose exactly which  pages I want. I can do 2, or I can do 4, or even more. The idea here is maybe you can save some paper if you don't mind the text being smaller or you just want to kind of print a preview of a document to look over and not necessarily the final document right now. You can choose the layout direction, the direction the pages flow. You can also place a border around the pages like that. You also have some other options here like go back to one page per sheet and I can reverse the page and flip it. 

Another section here is Watermark. If you go into this you can apply a watermark and you can type some text here. You can see how that prints on every page. You can decide where that goes. So it could be the bottom of the page, left, right, or diagonally across the page like that. You can select the text and click the Font button there and adjust the font so, let's make it bigger like this. We can use a different font like that. Depending upon the font you may have the option to do, say, bold like that. You can even change the color. Then click here and then click to change the color. You can also make it semi-transparent like that. So it could be a true watermark. 

Now if you like how you set things up, like I've got the border here, I've got the watermark and everything else is set the way I want you can actually Save this as a preset. So you click here at Presets and then you can Save Current Settings as a preset. Give it a name. You can make it available for all printers if you want or just the current printer. You've got two options here. Print Job Preset and Custom Preset and basically it is like the major and minor presets. Print Job is kind of the overriding one but you can also have Custom Presets. You can use them both. For instance, you may have a Print Job Preset that sets the border and other things and then a Custom Preset for this watermark. Then maybe several other Custom Presets for a different watermarks. Then you could choose the job preset and the custom preset on top of that. We're just going to make this a Job Preset here and now you can see I can look under Presets and it lists it here and I can select it. 

If you're interested in Presets just play around with them. Create Job Presets, create Custom Presets and try them out. Experiment and see what works for you. 

Now another important thing we've got here is the PDF Menu. Click on that and there are two very useful functions here. One is Save As PDF. You can select that and it will simply save this as a PDF document instead of printing it. So it's a way to export almost anything as a PDF, even if the app does not have an export as pdf option. If you can print you can then access this menu here, Save As PDF, and create a pdf. The other option here is Open in Preview. Open in Preview is very useful because it is basically the same thing as Save As PDF except it goes to Preview and then you can save the document. So, for instance, I can use this as a way to preview this. Since this is the only side the preview is going to be here in the Print Dialogue and it may not be big enough then Open in Preview gives me kind of a secondary way to preview. I haven't printed anything. I haven't saved anything. I'm just looking at what would be printed or what would be saved as a pdf. From this point I can click the Print button at the bottom to continue to print this or I can simply Save and create a PDF from it. If you're just doing this to preview printing the document you can just cancel. 

So here's some other tips. One problem some people have with the Print Dialogue in Ventura is they can't see the Print button. For instance, here in Safari let's go and print this page. Now one issue some people may have is that they can't see the Print button at the bottom of the screen. Now actually I can see it here. But you can see how it is partially cutoff. Sometimes it is completely cutoff. You can't see it at all. It seems like there is a bug that doesn't take into account very low screen resolutions and the Print Dialogue is a little too big. Since this section in here scrolls but the buttons at the bottom are outside of that section you can't see the Print Button. Well, an easy way to bring it up is to look at the Disclosure Triangle next to Media & Quality, or actually any of the ones below it like Layout, Paper Handling, etc. Then expand it or if it is already expanded just close it. Notice how the bottom section here with the Print Button and the PDF Button, that all jumps into view. 

Now note there are a lot of special cases when it comes to printing. For instance, in Numbers if I go to File, Print or Command P, it first takes me to a special Numbers print setup. I can do all sorts of things before I finally hit the Print Button. Then I go to the regular Print Dialogue. Chrome, if you actually go to print with Command P will take you to its own Custom Print Dialogue with the really big preview area here and its own special Chrome settings. But if you go to File, Print and hold the Option key down you get Print using System Dialogue. Then it takes you to the standard print dialogue but it is a little strange. First you get no preview there. Second it is a floating window outside of the Chrome window. Photoshop is another special case. It's kind of like Numbers. It goes to its own special print settings and then when you go to Print it continues on to the System Print Dialogue. 

Note that in some apps, Pages is one of them, you have in addition to Print, Page Setup. You can go to Page Setup and there are certain things you can adjust here before you even go to the Print Dialogue. So here I can change the paper size, the orientation and the scaling in Pages Setup and then when I go to Print I actually don't have those things here in the Print Dialogue like in other apps.

So that's a look at using the Print Dialogue, particularly in macOS Ventura and beyond. Remember your Print Dialogue is going to look different than mine because you probably have a different printer and perhaps you're also using a different app, maybe even a different document type when printing. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.