A Shorter Printer List in QuarkXPress
In QuarkXPress, if you commonly print to two or more PostScript printers, the long list of PPDs in the Print dialog gets in the way. You can simplify the list by “hiding” the printer descriptions (PPDs) for printers you never use: go to Utilities> PPD Manager and deselect them. (Useless trivia: before Acrobat became popular, Printer Description Files used the file suffix .pdf. Adobe later co-opted that suffix for Portable Document Format.)
Also, note the “Use Auxiliary Folder” checkbox. If you enable it, Quark will look at that folder instead of its own. I find it useful because then I don’t have to uncheck all the dozens (hundreds?) of printers in the PPD Manager. Instead, I can place copies of the PPDs I want to use into that folder and only those printers will appear in the Print dialog.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Thank you Mr Nelson, for the pointer- having up-graded to Mac OSX 10.5… all the previous printers were hidden.
Apple/HP’s recent release [Jan 2010?] of driver updaters looked useful but these too were apparently un-available after installation.
Looking now in the Quark>Preferences>PPD folder there are ‘hundreds’as you say, and some duplicated, with a .002 suffix.
Can these extraneous ppds be trashed with impunity?
Boy, that’s a good question! I looked in my PPD folder, and the only ones with .002 at the end were the Adobe PDF 8 and 9 PPDs — and they had different creation and modification dates!
Perhaps you can create a new folder, as outlined above, and place the ones you like into it. Then, try working. If all goes well, it seems like the duplicates could be archived — place them into a new folder somewhere, so you can get them back if you need to.