Where are the ink saving and "Print Selection" options?

For the printing problem, first check if it is the same thing printing from for example TextEdit. If so, and you do not get any better advice in this forum, I suggest you post your question in the printing forum: http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1224

For the print selection question, we had the same question in this forum a few months ago. Try searching the forum. As far as I remember, the answer was that the option simply is not there in Mac OS X. There probably also were some theories about why not and what one could do instead.

rosen wrote:
When printing a document with Pages I find no ink saving options of the kind I have on my PC, with Microsoft Word, and the same printer (HP photosmart). The options I refer to are Fast Draft, Everyday, Normal, Best - which regulate the amount of ink employed for a print.

Nothing to do with Pages.
As far as I know, it's a feature unavailable in the printer drivers on Mac OS X.

Nor have I been able to find the Print Selection option, whihc allows you to print just the text you highlight/select on a page.

As I don't know the internals of Mac OS X, I'm not sure that it's an application feature or a system one.
What is sure is that it is unavailable (even if you believe that it may not be there) 😉

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 3 mai 2008 21:08:31)

When printing a document with Pages I find no ink saving options of the kind I have on my PC, with Microsoft Word, and the same printer (HP photosmart). The options I refer to are Fast Draft, Everyday, Normal, Best - which regulate the amount of ink employed for a print.

A short introduction :

Microsoft Word for Windows passes printing commands through the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) on Microsoft Windows XP. GDI accents only three colourant components Red, Green, and Blue - it does not accept other colourant component models (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key, for instance). Inking is controlled by hardcoded curves in GDI printer drivers.

Colour cannot be controlled in the GDI printing pipeline except by bypassing the hardcoded curves in the sense that controlling colour presupposes that the convertible colourants that can reproduce a coded colour can be computed by the system. Microsoft has moved away from this model in Vista in 2007, and Apple moved away from this model in 2001.

The current models introduce the concept of controlling colour, that is, you keep the coded colours constant by computing the convertible colourants that will reproduce them in the given printing condition. The concept of controlling colour is embodied in the intelligent separation model of the International Color Consortium which uses the file format of ColorSync 2.

A short explanation :

In a colour controlled system, you need an ICC type PRTR Printer profile for the paper and ink combination of your printer. The data space of the PRTR Printer profile may be CMYK for publishing applications or RGB for productivity applications. You also need a printer driver for the make and model of your printer, in this case a Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart. You install the ICC type PRTR profile for the paper and ink combination of your printer in the ColorSync Utility, but bear in mind that as the amount of ink and the kind of paper is characterised in the PRTR Printer profile, colour matching is dependent on whether the characterisation was for e.g. Best (which would be what you want for the largest gamut possible since the more ink you lay down the larger the gamut you get).

In your case, your PhotoSmart printer presumably presupposes lowend sRGB as input when printing to specified HP papers. Whether the results are satisfactory is an open question. You may also try the HP site to see if HP offers specific ICC PRTR profiles for specific HP papers that work with your make and model of HP printer. Or better still, find a photographer who is willing to characterise your printer/ink/paper combination of choice using a proper spectrophotometer. Inkjets are surprisingly stable over long periods of time and your custom ICC profile should last for as long as HP keeps the ink recipe and paper production process stable.

Professional HP printers now come with a GretagMacbeth spectrophotometer built into the printer carriage along the same lines as the Image Control units of Heidelberg Speedmaster presses that have had GretagMacbeth spectrophotometers with an array of optical fibres to take readings across the sheet.

So, your problem has nothing to do with Pages because pages uses the intelligent separation model of the International Color Consortium just as Pages uses the intelligent composition model of the Unicode Consortium (which by the bye is based on the SFNT Spline Font model of Apple TrueType 1).

Best wishes,

Henrik Holmegaard
technical writer

Ink saver is a printer option which you can adjust from the printer dialog box. Leopard has two printer dialog modes - minimized and ginormous. In minimized mode you'll see a pop-up menu to select which printer you want to use (assuming you have more than one) and next to it, there'll be a disclosure triangle. If your dialog is in minimized mode click on the triangle to get the full view.

In full view you can see a smallish page preview and lots of other options including page orientation. Beneath the page orientation icons there's a pop-up menu of print options including Page Handing, Page Layout, etc. The ink saver option will probably be found in the pop-up menu item named Printer Options of something similar. But you may have to just look at the contents of each pop-up menu item.

When printing a document with Pages I find no ink saving options

Depends on the printer perhaps? I seem to have some with my Canon Pixma ip6000:

Nor have I been able to find the Print Selection option, whihc allows you to print just the text you highlight/select on a page.

A possible workaround for this would be a utility or script or service that lets you print whatever is in the clipboard, e.g.

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/category-printing-002b-pdf.html

http://osiris.laya.com/