it’s all about having the right profile

Printing “properly” is too complicated
 

We all want to print “properly” - using cheap paper when we can, producing draft documents in monochrome, printing several presentation slides to a page.
But when you need a document quickly, setting the countless print options needed to produce a “proper” document is asking too much. We just press Print and take whatever comes out.

The solution

Almost all printer and multifunctional manufacturers have developed tools to help. They call them ‘profiles’.
A profile is nothing more than a collection of print settings. By selecting a single profile you can enable multiple settings at once. For example, a profile called “PowerPoint draft” could Print in monochrome with toner-saving enabled
Print slides in landscape orientation, 2 per page, double-sided
Send the printed document to ‘your’ output mailbox
Without a profile, that would take six different settings spread over multiple tabs in the driver. A related “PowerPoint quality” profile could add alterations:
Print in colour
Use quality paper

In action
 

A profile is a collection of print settings that can be recalled en masse with a single button press.
Most printer drivers come with a collection of profiles already created.
You can create custom profiles to suit the type of printing you do.

Creating a profile
 

Different manufacturers use different commands to save new profiles so we can’t provide ’one size fits all’ instructions. However, the procedure is typically:
Make all the changes you require in the driver, as if you were printing
Save the settings under a profile name of your choosing

In action
 

To create a profile, enable the printer driver settings you want to use in the future, then save them as a profile.
Name your profiles according to when you would use them (“PowerPoint draft”) rather than what they do (“Mono, draft, duplex, plain paper mailbox 2”).

Enhancing as well as simplifying
 

Because profiles make it so easy to enable and disable printer driver settings, it’s worth adding little-used options to them. Your driver might support a gloss mode or have special options for printing photos or computer-generated graphics.
Such options can enhance print quality but are usually too hidden in the depths of the printer driver to make them worth looking for. If they’re part of a profile, they would be enabled automatically.

No profiles? No problem...
 

Some manufacturers don’t support printer profiles. In this case, you can usually install the printer driver multiple times under different names.
Each instance of the driver could invoke different print options in just the same way as a profile would.