I’d been having problems for several weeks, maybe months, with printing out some kinds of documents from my office MacBook Pro. I’d send the print jobs to our trusty Xerox WorkCentre Pro 55, and I’d get one copy of the document. This was okay when I only wanted one copy. But, I’d increasingly had a need for several … so defaulting to one just made it difficult to get multiple original copies (or “mopies,” I guess, if you subscribe to HP-lingo) when I needed them.
This problem seemed to spread from PDFs in Safari, to all PDFs, and then to other document types — including, most recently, documents printed directly from Microsoft Word 2004. At this point, I became aggravated enough that I tried some very minimal troubleshooting, which quickly led nowhere. I just wanted this to work.
So, I took the shotgun approach. I hate doing this, because I want to know the whys and wherefores of problems. I want to apply the scientific method to finding and resolving the issue at hand. I want to prevent the problem from appearing again. In this case, though, I just needed to print … and I resorted to the “Reset Printing System” menu command in Printer Setup Utility.
Voilá! That let me print multiple copies of my Word files again. Great!
I next tried a PDF that had failed to print completely before. I’ve had success with that, as well. Excellent.
Therefore, if you know the definitions for your printers — because the “Reset Printing System” command in Tiger will delete your print queues and force you to re-add them — then the reset option can resolve some strange problems and get you back in working order.