Betalogue

Here is a bug that I wouldn’t have discovered by myself, because I only use one printer, but a reader pointed it out to me and I was able to reproduce it on my machine by simply adding a second printer in System Preferences, under “Print & Fax,” for testing purposes.

1. Make sure you have 2 different printers in “Print & Fax,” Printer A and Printer B. Choose “Printer A” as option for “Default Printer”.
2. Create document in Pages. Save it under a name. (The saving step is important. Otherwise, the bug won’t occur.)
3. Choose “Print…” in the “File” menu in Pages.
4. In the “Print” dialog, the default printer should be Printer A. Choose Printer B and print document (or save as PDF).
5. The document now has the so-called “dirty” state, because the printing process modifies it. Save it and close it.
6. Reopen the saved document.
7. Choose “Print…” again. The printer should be Printer A (which is the default printer). Instead, it’s Printer B.

The default printer in System Preferences is Printer A. Therefore Mac OS X should revert to that printer every time. In addition, even if, after the steps above, you choose Printer A, print the document, then save it and reopen it again, if you bring up the “Print” dialog again, it’s back on Printer B by default.

Now that‘s definitely wrong. And I can see how frustrating it can be for people who use multiple printers on a daily basis. According to my reader, the problem is not new in Pages ’09, but has yet to be acknowledged or fixed, in spite of multiple bug reports.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.