About using printer drivers

If you are printing on a desktop printer, you are probably already using the correct driver. When you used the Add Printer Wizard in Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP, you specified which printers you’d be using, and your Windows operating system installed the appropriate drivers.

Commercial printing services will likely print your publication using an imagesetter with a PostScript Raster Image Processor (RIP) as the first step toward going to press.

If your commercial printing service accepts Publisher files, you can simply hand the files off and let the commercial printing service do the work. This is the best practice, since it gives your commercial printing service full control over how they print your publication. In some cases, however, you might need to save your publication as a PostScript file (for example, if your commercial printing service uses only Macintosh computers, or if they do not accept Publisher files).

When you save a PostScript file, everything in your publication— layout, pictures, and fonts— is translated into PostScript. You can then give the PostScript file to a commercial printer who will download it to the imagesetter's RIP. To create the PostScript file, you will need to use a PostScript driver that is compatible with the printer used by your commercial printing service.

Note  Be sure to consult with your commercial printing service before handing off a PostScript file to them. They will likely want you to select certain options in the Print dialog box that will ensure successful printing. They may also want to supply you with a printer driver to use when saving the PostScript file that corresponds to the imagesetter they will use to print your publication.