Topics in this chapter   Choosing an Operating System     Choosing a Web Browser     Administering Fonts     Printing Documents

Printing Documents

Using the international features of Microsoft Office XP in documents creates some special requirements for printing. You must ensure that your printers are configured for the correct paper size and for font substitution.

Specifying the correct paper size

Many printers allow you to load both A4 and letter-size paper. If users in Europe exchange documents with users in the United States, having both A4 and letter-size paper in your printers accommodates everyone's documents.

Even if your printers are stocked only with the paper commonly used in your part of the world, most Office documents are printed with no loss of text. Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations are automatically scaled to fit the printer's default paper size. Microsoft Outlook messages are printed according to locally defined default print parameters. Microsoft FrontPage documents are printed according to the browser's page layout settings.

Note   For Microsoft Publisher documents, users must open documents and manually change the paper size. For Microsoft Access reports, users must open a report, manually change the paper size, close the report, reopen the report, and then print.

In some circumstances, you might not want documents scaled to fit the printer's default paper size. For example, if your printer has A4 set as its default paper size but the printer also has letter-size paper, then Word cannot detect that both sizes are available. Because the printer can supply the correct size paper, you might want to turn off the resizing option that is available in Word.

System Policy Tip   You can use a system policy to turn off the Allow A4/Letter paper resizing option on the Print tab (Options menu) in Word. In the System Policy Editor, set the Microsoft Word 2002\Tools | Options\Print\Printing options\Allow A4/Letter paper resizing policy.For more information about the System Policy Editor, see Using System Policies.

Setting TrueType fonts to print correctly

To display characters in multiple scripts, Office uses big fonts. In addition to being bold or italic, big fonts can also be Cyrillic, Greek, or one of several other scripts.

However, big fonts are also TrueType® fonts, and many laser printers substitute built-in printer fonts when printing documents that use TrueType fonts. Built-in printer fonts cannot render text in multiple scripts, so characters in other scripts do not print properly.

For example, your laser printer might substitute its own internal version of Arial, which accommodates only Western European characters. Word uses the big font version of Arial to display Greek and Russian characters in documents, but if users print those documents, the Greek and Russian characters are printed as unintelligible Western European character strings.

To work around the problem, set the option in your printer driver to send TrueType fonts as graphics.

Tip   Some non-Asian printers cannot properly print Asian documents because the size of the Asian font is too large for the printer's memory. You might need to install additional memory in these printers.

See also

Unicode might affect the way that Office XP documents are printed. For information about Office XP support of Unicode, see Taking Advantage of Unicode Support.