Look for the Simple Answer First

Look for the Simple Answer First

by Dennis Hamblin

Here is the story of how to watch for every little detail of how you do things.

I work with two printers. A Brother laser printer and an Epson Photo Stylus 1270. The Brother is used for text and also for some run offs of images before printing with the 1270. I am frequently using the CHOOSER to switch between printers. What follows I first thought was the fault of one printer or the other. And then perhaps Photoshop. Eventually I found the fault lay with me and none of the software or hard ware.

Recently I upgraded to Photoshop 7. I prepared an image for printing. Put the Brother printer into manual mode and output a test print. In this instance the creation was all to be done on the Brother instead of the Epson. The sample print was to my satisfaction so I then loaded up the paper tray and pressed print.

Disaster struck. The print driver indicated the printer was printing but in actual fact nothing physical was happening. I could not cancel the print job , nor could I shut the computer down unless I forced it to by pressing the button on the G4 tower. I then had to wait while Disc First Aid took place and eventually the computer rebooted.

I could not comprehend what was going wrong. I phoned one of the Mac dealers who suggested I reinstall the Brother print driver. This I did more than once, but still all to no avail. I even down loaded driver from the Brother web site. After several attempts I e mailed Adobe. All this took several days.

I then got the answer myself. I immediately e mailed Adobe to cancel my request for help.

What I had overlooked was this: when I signaled the Brother to process a MANUAL print the instruction was recorded against it in the Photoshop file. When I tried to print several copies it was expecting me to feed a Manual load because that is how I had first asked it to print for me. Because I was not manually loading the media this time but expecting the printer to take paper from the paper tray it did not understand me. And I had the apparent error.

The lesson from all of this is check the printer driver settings each time you go to print. Make sure they are in accord with how you intend to handle the job. If you have set it to do things a certain way it will continue to try and do this unless you change it.