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Setting Default Print Options for Client Drivers
The last sentence might be viewed with mixed feelings by some users and Admins. They have struggled for hours
and could not arrive at a point where their settings seemed to be saved. It is not their fault. The confusing
thing is that in the multitabbed dialog that pops up when you right-click on the printer name and select
, you can arrive at two dialogs that appear identical, each claiming that
they help you to set printer options in three different ways. Here is the definitive answer to the Samba
default driver setting FAQ:
“I can not set and save default print options
for all users on Windows 200x/XP. Why not?”.
How are you doing it? I bet the wrong way. (It is not easy to find out, though.) There are three different
ways to bring you to a dialog that seems to set everything. All three dialogs look the same, but only one of
them does what you intend. You need to be Administrator or Print Administrator to do this for all users. Here
is how I reproduce it in an XP Professional:
-
The first “wrong” way:
-
Open the Printers folder.
-
Right-click on the printer (
remoteprinter on cupshost
) and
select in context menu .
-
Look at this dialog closely and remember what it looks like.
-
The second “wrong” way:
-
Open the folder.
-
Right-click on the printer (
remoteprinter on
cupshost
) and select in the context menu
-
Click on the General
tab.
-
Click on the Printing
Preferences... button.
-
A new dialog opens. Keep this dialog open and go back
to the parent dialog.
-
The third and correct way (should you do this from the beginning, just carry out steps 1
and 2 from the second method above):
-
Click on the Advanced
tab. (If everything is “grayed out,” then you are not logged
in as a user with enough privileges.)
-
Click on the Printing
Defaults button.
-
On any of the two new tabs,
click on the
Advanced button.
-
A new dialog opens. Compare
this one to the other. Are they
identical when you compare one from
“B.5” and one from A.3?
Do you see any difference in the two settings dialogs? I do not either. However, only the last one, which you
arrived at with steps C.1 through C.6 will permanently save any settings which will then become the defaults
for new users. If you want all clients to have the same defaults, you need to conduct these steps as
administrator (
printer admin) before a client downloads the driver (the clients can
later set their own per-user defaults by following procedures A or B above). Windows 200x/XP allow per-user
default settings and the ones the administrator gives them before they set up their own. The parents of the
identical-looking dialogs have a slight difference in their window names; one is called
Default Print Values for Printer Foo on Server Bar (which is the one you
need) and the other is called “
Print Settings for Printer Foo on Server
Bar
”. The last one is the one you arrive at when you right-click on the printer and
select . This is the one that you were taught to use back in the
days of Windows NT, so it is only natural to try the same way with Windows 200x/XP. You would not dream that
there is now a different path to arrive at an identical-looking, but functionally different, dialog to set
defaults for all users.
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