Windows 7 Tutorial

Printing and Printers in Windows 7

Although much of your time is spent on screen, printing digital documents or pictures on paper remains a common way to share information gathered, for example, from online sources. As such, the ability and options available when printing documents, photos, and other files in Windows 7 warranted a series of tutorials of their own.

In this series of free Windows 7 tutorials, you will learn how to deal with both the hardware and software aspects of printing: how to preview files before you print them, how to configure the page setup settings, print multiple copies of the same content, or limit the number of pages you print (like how to print only the first page of a document), etc. But we will also explain how to connect and install printers on Windows 7, both local printers and remote (shared) printers over the local network or HomeGroup, and how to change default printer, customize your favorite printer's default behavior, or how to uninstall a printer and its driver.

 

Windows 7 supports both physical printers and virtual print drivers

As you may already know, Windows 7 -like its predecessors, lets you print documents to an actual printer (a physical machine connected to your computer or another PC on the network), but also to what are called "print drivers", or pieces of software that act like printers; two common examples are the Acrobat PDF, which allows you to "print to PDF", or more simply put, to save any type of file as a PDF document. Another common print driver is Microsoft's own "XPS Document Writer" print driver, which allows you to save any file as an "XPS" document, which -like PDF- looks the same on screen as it does when printed on a sheet of paper.

• What does "PDF" stand for? Answer: it is an acronym for "Portable Document Format".
• What does "XPS" stand for? Answer: it is an acronym for XML Paper Specification. (XML, itself an acronym, stands for "eXtensible Markup Language".)

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