New Office 2010 Printing Functionality

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Now that the Office 2010 Technical Preview is out, we’re happy to announce some great new printing experiences.

clip_image002Print Place

The most obvious printing feature is a dramatically redesigned print dialog known as the “Print Place” that is available in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, and Publisher. This dialog is optimized to present the most commonly used print job settings at the top level UI and reduce the need to use the Page Setup dialog or a custom print properties page.

Two features that were formerly not available in the top level print dialog for most Office applications are stapling and automatic duplexing. Office is able to show these features when connecting to printers that support these capabilities and expose them using the Print Schema Specification. All other printer settings are gathered using the DEVMODE struct or the document. In order to support stapling and duplexing, the print driver must have implemented PrintTicket support and these features must be exposed in the public PrintSchemaKeywords namespace.

Here are the links to the relevant keywords, defined by https://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2003/08/printing/printschemakeywords.

Stapling JobStapleAllDocuments keyword

DocumentStaple keyword
Duplex

JobDuplexAllDocumentsContiguously keyword

DocumentDuplex keyword

 

XPS Print Path Support

Publisher 2010 will support printing to the XPS print path in order to provide users with the highest quality print experience available. This feature is enabled in the Technical Preview release, and will be used automatically when the target printer is installed with an XPS driver. When an XPS driver is not available, Publisher falls back to legacy GDI printing. Users may opt out of the XPS print path using the Publisher Options > Advanced > Use XPS-enhanced print path when available checkbox. Publisher does not indicate to end-users which path is being used at print time.

This implementation of XPS printing is based on the Office 2010 Save as XPS feature. Issues encountered in the Technical Preview when printing from Publisher 2010 should be checked against Publisher 2010’s Save as XPS output.

This feature does not use the XPS Print APIs introduced for Windows 7.

 

Justin