For me, one of the most annoying aspects of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the print queue. When you want to print a document for the first time after having turned on your Mac, your printer’s queue will open as a regular application in your Dock. There’s no problem with that, since it never hurts to see the progress of your print job (or to see if there are any phantom print jobs still sitting in the queue).
After your print job completes, however, the print queue icon continues to sit in the Dock. Why? This never used to be the case in versions of Mac OS X before 10.4. I definitely can see the need at publishing firms to keep the queue open when you’re printing dozens of documents and need to monitor their progress, but for the average user, there’s no need to do this.
When Apple released 10.5, the company decided to make the print queue’s default status be to remain open. That means the user needs to tell the print queue to automatically quit after the print job is complete. How do we do this?
- Open the print queue (either by printing a document or by opening System Preferences, selecting “Print & Fax,” then clicking on a printer, and finally clicking the “Open Print Queue…” button).
- Command-Click (right click) on the print queue icon on the Dock and from the pop-up list, select Auto Quit). That’s it! Note that the print queue will actually stay open at this point because nothing is printing. If you quit the print queue and then try printing something, you’ll see that it works.
Did this hint work for you? Have you found a better way to handle this “feature”? Do you want the queue to remain open? Let others know in the comments.
Related Posts
Previous post: Some of My Favorite Things: Software
Next post: Spaces: Gather All Windows in One Space
Loading ...
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
OMG, that was so easy. I wish I had taken the time to search for that. I had been annoyed about that small change since I upgraded to Leopard a few months back.
Glen’s last blog post..No Wii, Maybe PS3
Lol – I recently discovered this myself a few months back. Why in the world would this *not* be the default configuration?
I can’t remember a time in all my computing life where I would have wanted this. Crazy.
Thank you i really needed that!!!
Thank you. This has been driving me nuts. With all the work Apple does to make things as clean and simple as possible I would think it would close by default after the print job is complete. Apple really needs to make a check box to control this function. Thanks again for you help!
thank you thank you THANK YOU!!! i thought it as only me!!!
dang! that’s been buggin’ me for months!
(ok ok, so i only *just* buckled down to figger it out and your post came up)
{ 1 trackback }