Expand Printing Options

It's been a year since Apple first shipped "Leopard", its fifth retail version of OS X. Which means it's been about a year since I started hearing people complain about Leopard's truncated printer controls. Many users still haven't discovered that the printing options in 10.5 are hidden behind that unlabeled blue arrow, and those that have are tired of constantly expanding the print dialog just to do their jobs.

If you never again want your users annoyed and flummoxed by this user interface puzzle, you can easily change the default display setting for the print dialog. Just open the Terminal and type:

defaults write -g PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool TRUE

This changes the print settings for the current user, defaulting to the expanded print dialog above and exposing the options previously stored in the "Page Setup" dialog.