Thursday, November 17, 2011

Navigation (Or My Annoying Process of Printing With Color Ink)

Maybe I'm just spoiled growing up in the 90's, but I expect all menus nowadays to be as close to intuitive as possible. I understand when working across hardware, certain limitations must apply, but the process of asking my printer to print black using only color ink (because I have color left, but no black) nearly enacted the some printer smashing rage in my room.

Naturally, my first thought would be to go straight to the Options button, but that yielded only this result:

It would allow me to print on the BACK OF THE SHEET, but no color options whatsoever. So I do the next best thing, and go back to "Properties" on the previous page. Note that by changing the ink usage, I am certainly not changing the "Properties" of the printer.


 Here we see the properties page. I had to look through every single tab, first going to "Main" and "Effects", before finally going to "Maintenance." At last, here, I find something similar to what I want:

You would think by this point I would be done, but no, that would be too easy. Upon printing, it told me I was out of black ink (duhh), upon which it gave me two clickable buttons, one titled "Shop for Ink" and the other "Cancel Printing". At this point I nearly gave up. Only after many tries did I finally decide it would be best to click the little tiny (X) to close the window. For some reason this worked, and my printer printed as I would like it to. I have not been able to replicate this last part since I first switched it, so I guess it caught on. Still, this has been one of my worst memories navigating virtual space through menus.

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