What's New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

Disclaimer: although I am an Apple Certified Trainer by day, this guide is not endorsed by or affiliated with Apple in any way, nor is it indicative of future Apple Training courses. It is based entirely on my own personal experience and research. Any inaccuracies are my fault. Comments and corrections welcome at f8dy@diveintomark.org.

Printing and Faxing: the new Printer Setup Utility

Printing also has some improvements in Mac OS X 10.3. There is system-wide fax capability (from any print dialog), and desktop printers are back!

The new Print & Fax pane in System Preferences sets some global options about printing, such as the default selected printer in the Print dialog, and the default paper size. You can also enable Printer Sharing (via Rendezvous), either here, or in the Sharing pane.

Printer Setup Utility, formerly called Print Center, is located in /Applications/Utilities/. It is where you add printers.

New in Mac OS X 10.3, you can print directly to Windows shared printers over the network. Select "Windows printing" from the drop-down menu in the Add Printer window, and it will auto-populate any Windows shared printers on your network.

Desktop printing is back! All printers are really applications now (if you get info on a printer, it actually runs the application), and a desktop printer is simply an alias to that printer's control application. To create a desktop printer, select a printer from the list and choose "Create desktop printer" from the Printers menu. It defaults to saving it on your desktop, but you can really save it anywhere.

Getting info on a desktop printer confirms that it is really just an alias to the printer control application, stored in your ~/Library/Printers/ directory.

The other major new printing feature in Mac OS X is system-wide faxing. You can both send faxes from any application, and you can set up your computer to receive faxes as well. Receiving faxes is off by default; to enable it, go to the Faxing tab of the Print & Fax pane of System Preferences and select "Receive faxes on this computer". You set up your fax number and faxing options, and the directory where you want to save faxes. (By default, incoming faxes are stored in /Users/Shared/Faxes/, and I'm guessing that they are stored as PDFs. You can also automatically email received faxes to a specific address, or automatically print them to a specific printer.

You can send a fax from any application. From the Print dialog, just click "Fax".

Once you click "Fax", you are presented with another window where you can enter the name of the person receiving the fax and the fax's subject, type a cover page, and select a modem to use.

Outgoing faxes are managed in Printer Setup Utility. Double-click on a specific modem to see the fax queue and hold, resme, or delete individual faxes. Note that the modem used for the fax is treated just like a printer; you can even create a desktop printer out of it and have desktop faxing.

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