Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

Why do Leopard printers hang around on the Dock?

I'm loving Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, but there's one "feature" that's driving me crazy: when I print anything, the printer application hangs around until I quit it. In the good old days (Panther) the printer would quit and vanish once the queue was empty. Is there some way to restore that behavior?

Dave's Answer:

I know what you mean about the printer being too darn persistent, actually. It's been sitting on my Dock all day since I printed a few pages earlier this morning. Very annoying as I try to minimize the number of apps I have running at any time so my Dock is clean and uncluttered.

Fortunately, there's a remarkably easy solution, albeit one that might not be obvious.

What you need to do is click - and hold the button down - on the printer icon in the Dock. The menu pops up and you'll see what to do next:

Choose "Auto Quit", then Quit the printer application and it should automatically quit after emptying the queue from now on.

Interestingly, there's no option in the printer utility itself to make this change, no preferences, nothing. If you don't know about the Dock menu option, you're stuck.

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumble Upon

Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 7692)
Tagged: leopard, mac os x, printers
Previous: Does Firefox support private Web browsing?
Next: External Facebook links to invite friends to connect?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

PERFECT! Thank you!

Worked instantly. And like a charm!

And you're right. I'd never thought to look on the dock button menu for a feature such as this.

Although I had looked every other concievable place for it - to no avail. One of those typical "Apple Things" wherein the logic is unassailable - once you find it! Up until then, it mystifies you completely!

One of the reasons I've had a love/hate affair with the Mac OS since the days of Lisa! Oops - I mean Mac XL (as it was properly known back then.)

Mark

Posted by: Mark in NYC at November 15, 2007 3:47 PM

Had no freakin' idea. Thanks, Dave!

Posted by: Don Morris at July 7, 2009 10:22 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!