We regularly have issues with people accidentally printing to the wrong printer. Unfortunately, I cannot remove these printers as they are printers they need to print to. However, I want to try to make them think before they print. I would like to either force no default printer so they have to choose (I don't think this is possible), or, after choosing to print, I'd like for a prompt to come up and have the user confirm the printer they want to print to. Perhaps some kind of intermediary print driver that could do the prompting?
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Fineprint is something like the "intermediary printer driver" you are describing with some advanced functionalities, but it will cost you. A cheap alternative would be to set the default printer driver to some virtual printer like a PDF creator - this will at least stop the users from wasting paper immediately.
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the-wabbit
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How about setting the default printer to be the printer you do want them to print to?
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joeqwerty
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The printer will vary. They print to several different printers daily. – obsidian Jul 25 '11 at 01:33
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1Right, but the solution is to set the default printer to be the printer you want them to print to most of the time, forcing them to select the other printers as needed. – joeqwerty Jul 25 '11 at 01:39
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You can't guess correctly every time and users tend to forget about the details of the infrastructure they're working in. In fact an "always ask the user for confirmation about the printer chosen" option seems useful if users need to print to different destinations - I observe quite often that action comes before thinking about the consequences (and I explicitly do not exclude myself here - what usually saves my paper is the fact that "my" printers are set up in different cities and the VPNs filter printing traffic, so I **have** to notice a stray printing job). – the-wabbit Jul 25 '11 at 08:49