Printing...At Last!

We’ve finally made it to the heart of the matter: actually printing your work. So to print your drawing, you go to File Ø Print and click OK, right? Right??

Would that it were that easy.

For basic proofing on a laser printing, perhaps it is. But if you rely on CorelDRAW for professional output and accurate communication of your work to a service bureau, you’ll need to know about more than just the OK button. Here is a tour of the six tabs of the Print dialog (or seven, if you’re printing to a PostScript device).

General

Again, for commonplace print jobs, this might be the only stop you’ll need to make, as Corel has done a good job of placing the most common controls on the first page of the dialog.

Destination

This section of the General page describes the current output device and/or method. Initially, this is your system default. Changing the selection at this point is simply a matter of choosing another from the drop-down list. From the list, you can select any other installed printer or output device (such as a fax/modem driver) or the new DRAW 9 option of Device Independent PostScript File. The other fields will change to reflect related settings. Most of this information is self-explanatory. The Status field is probably most useful in a shared-printer environment, when you need to know if the printer is available. The Where field is the output destination (either a physical port such as LPT1 or a logical port such as FILE or a directory or filename).

When you select Device Independent PostScript File for output, DRAW will control the device setup instead of a driver. You can select any media size defined in the page size settings of the Options dialog, including any custom definitions you have added to this list. Device Independent PostScript offers a way to output completely DSC-compliant PostScript files with no interference from device-dependent operations. This is especially desirable if you are sending PostScript files to post-processing applications like TrapWise, PressWise, etc.

If you select a different printer and cancel without printing, your selection is promptly forgotten and the default printer is again selected. If you proceed and print a document, the printer and other options you chose are retained for subsequent printing of that document during the current session.

WARNING DRAW’s multiple-document capability allows each document to retain its own print settings. Generally, this is a good thing; it will reduce the required steps each time you print. You need to be careful, though, if you’re working on several documents at once. If each document uses different page sizes, printers, and so forth, you may lose track of which file goes to what printer and with which settings. (We know this from personal experience!)

Properties

This button takes you to your printer’s own driver settings. Here you can control many printer settings that would normally be accessed from the printer’s Properties dialog in the Windows Control Panel. The main difference when you change the settings from within DRAW is that they will only stick with the document for the duration of your session. Open another application or a new DRAW document, and everything reverts to the default printer and its settings. So if you find yourself entering Properties and making the same change over and over again, you should make one trip to Start Ø Settings Ø Printers and make the change there. That way, it will become the default.

Print to File

The Print to File option allows you to create a file that can later be downloaded to the selected output device. You can install drivers or PPDs for remote devices or select the new Device Independent PostScript File output method, and record the printer command code in a print file (usually with a .prn or .ps filename extension) for later output.

Print to File is especially useful for creating files destined for output at service bureaus. That means you don’t need to own a $50,000 imagesetter, and the service bureau doesn’t need to have CorelDRAW or your chosen fonts in their shop—or even a DOS/Windows computer, for that matter. Print files can be created for both PostScript and non-PostScript output devices. However, most devices found at service bureaus are PostScript.

Next to the Print to File check box is a new flyout arrow giving you access to even more options. Included on this flyout are three toggles for controlling the final file. You can choose to have all pages in multipage files sent to one file, each page to a separate file, and even each color separation (plate) sent to its own file.

This brings us to the For Mac option. If you are preparing files for a Macintosh-based service bureau, you will want to select this option when you create a print file. It tells DRAW to strip out a start/end control character (Ctrl+D) from PostScript files. This character is informative to DOS-based printers, but it tends to choke Mac networks.

Look for details on preparing files for service bureaus throughout the rest of this chapter.

	TIP You can also instruct your printer to strip this control character for all printing under Windows. To do this, go to Start Ø Settings Ø Printer, choose the desired printer, and press Alt+Enter to get its Properties sheet. From there, go to the PostScript page, click Advanced, and find the options for sending the Ctrl+D character.

 copy filename.prn LPT1 /B