Jon -

Sometimes it's a fine line between trying to speak directly to the person who asked the question, in terms they'll pick up, and avoiding confusion for others, who see things differently, or see a different problem.

Since you answered the original question in your first post, perhaps I did wander a bit.

You're quite correct, of course, that when you make the first step to print it's usually the program you're in that produces the first dialogue screen, and a screen that offers options about format, page layout, or size probably originates in the program. The formatting and resizing needs to be done by the program, within the program, before anything is passed to the printer - or before you are handed on to a true "printer dialogue" that's directly based on the print driver.

Many programs, though, do vary the options offered in the "program's print dialogue" based on the default printer you have set up, and in fact the printer selection, and properties from the print driver, can be passed back into program dialogues in quite a lot of places.

A classic example of "printer properties" obtained from the "printer driver" being "passed back" to the program was in very old Word versions, where selecting a font while entering text was affected by the default printer choice. You would be offered only those fonts the default printer could print. Change the default printer, and you might get different typefaces to choose from. The program obtained, from the print driver, information on what fonts the default printer could handle, and offered only those fonts on internal program dialogue screens. It was very important that you compose your document for the specific printer you intended to use, if exact appearance of the print was important.

Note for those with "very old Word" who haven't seen this: Drivers currently available for even very old printers now provide "aliasing" to allow all printers to print nearly all fonts, so the effect of this "feature" is pretty much invisible on most reasonably current machines. Updates to the old Office programs may also have expanded the font handling capabilities as well. Even if the feature is still "functional," it only appears if you have mixed font kinds, Adobe (Type 2), TrueType, Bitstream, etc., installed.

Some programs give you places to put in, in the dialogue that comes directly from the program, information that you will have a chance to change when you get to the "printer dialogue," since the program "knows" - from the default printer driver - how the information can be passed on at the next step where you speak directly to the "printer." The program may need to know what the later "printer" settings will be in order to complete formatting, before you're sent to the printer dialogue. The selection of a default printer and the driver installed for that printer may affect what options appear in the program's print setup dialogue, as well as "inside" the program in places one wouldn't expect.

For most uses, it doesn't matter whether you're talking to the program, or to the print spool, or to the printer itself. It's all just "Printing." It does matter that you select a default printer appropriate for the intended end use, because the program itself may get information about the intended end use from the driver for the printer set as default while the "page" is being created, formatted, and printed. Features available in the program can, and often do, depend on what default printer is selected.

Most recent Office programs are capable of handling features even a fairly "sophisticated" printer might use. In many cases, the newer Office programs will let you use some features the default printer doesn't know about, since the ability to send the page, with those extra features ignored, in printer-appropriate form, is part of the newer programs and print drivers - and you might want to send the page to someone with a better printer that recognizes the features. Other programs, some quite sophisticated, and older Office programs, may not be this flexible, and will only allow you to use features that the default printer can read - because the "default driver" tells them what they can let you use with the default printer.

John