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Can we talk for a second about the printer dialogs in Mojave?

Janichsan

Janichsan

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 23, 2006
3,191
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While I'm generally rather content with Mojave, one thing that bugs me massively is what Apple has done to the printer dialogs in their own apps, i.e. Preview, Safari, Mail, TextEdit, etc.

I want to preface this with stating that I'm using a Canon printer. I cannot completely rule out that my observations are specific to a certain types or makers of printers, and I'm interested to know if anyone else, maybe with different printers, has made the same experiences.

So, where's the problem?

Before Mojave, the printer options where spread over four pages as shown below: Quality & Media, Color Options, Borderless Printing, and Duplex Printing & Margin.

5ZZtRns.png


Each of these pages contained tidily arranged control elements, as for example here for Quality & Media:

XNVpLSF.png


And now?

Only a single page for all these printer options. (The following pictures will all be in German – you will see why.)

mJ4XOL5.jpg


This page contains of a long, unsorted list of drop-down menus, which looks as if an intern slapped it together in five minutes on his lunch break.

Tx5Kzar.png

mFAcTL3.png


bUlfja8.png

And maybe you already noticed why I posted these screenshots of the German version: apparently no one bothered to properly localise this mess. Everything marked with a red arrow is unlocalised, which includes also the (in the previous picture not obvious) options for Halftoning ("Halbton"):

GlQ9dCl.png


(And that's even ignoring the fact that this menu makes as little sense as a dropdown menu labeled "Ferrari", giving you the options to choose between "Car" and "Mercedes": Halftoning and Diffusion are subtypes of dithering.)

It gets worse. See the menus I marked with blue arrows? These are duplicate entries.

Is this what Apple's dedication to give the user a quality experience looks like nowadays? This complete mess that even puts the worst hobbyist open-source projects to shame?

And before you ask: this has nothing to with the drivers. All third-party applications still have the tidy printer options they had before the upgrade. The screenshot above I gave as "before" example was actually taken five minutes before the others under Mojave in MS Word. This crap is purely limited to Apple's own applications.
 
Last edited:
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This happens if the app is compiled with the 10.14sdk and with "Hardened runtime" on. So it's not that Apple decided to break things only in their apps.
I guess they are using a new different and more secure print panel, but the printer options are not organised like before (for my Epson printer, they are organised in a different way, but they are still in three different submenus).
Probably they didn't test it well with Canon drivers.

It sucks, but did you report the issue to Apple?
 
Ritsuka said:
It sucks, but did you report the issue to Apple?
Click to expand...
Not yet, I wanted to see first what other people's experiences are. But that's some interesting insight, that this problem is connected to the SDK.
 
Open the app called 'Feedback Assistant' are report the issues, I have found you get a response from an actual engineer or developer when you report things though the app. You may need to join the beta program in order to get the app installed though.
 
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Spazturtle said:
Open the app called 'Feedback Assistant' are report the issues, I have found you get a response from an actual engineer or developer when you report things though the app. You may need to join the beta program in order to get the app installed though.
Click to expand...
o_O Woah. There's a Feedback Assistent?

I in fact have the app, so no beta necessary.

Wait, I do need to be in the beta program to use it. It requires a login. Damn.
 
Janichsan said:
o_O Woah. There's a Feedback Assistent?

I in fact have the app, so no beta necessary.

Wait, I do need to be in the beta program to use it. It requires a login. Damn.
Click to expand...

Try your AppleID login/password. If you have ever been a part of the beta program (not just for Mojave or iOS 12) it should work.

:apple:
 
SRLMJ23 said:
Try your AppleID login/password. If you have ever been a part of the beta program (not just for Mojave or iOS 12) it should work.

:apple:
Click to expand...
Already tried that. I guess I've never been in a beta program.
 
Janichsan said:
While I'm generally rather content with Mojave, one thing that bugs me massively is what Apple has done to the printer dialogs in their own apps, i.e. Preview, Safari, Mail, TextEdit, etc.

I want to preface this with stating that I'm using a Canon printer. I cannot completely rule out that my observations are specific to a certain types or makers of printers, and I'm interested to know if anyone else, maybe with different printers, has made the same experiences.

So, where's the problem?

Before Mojave, the printer options where spread over four pages as shown below: Quality & Media, Color Options, Borderless Printing, and Duplex Printing & Margin.
....
And before you ask: this has nothing to with the drivers. All third-party applications still have the tidy printer options they had before the upgrade. The screenshot above I gave as "before" example was actually taken five minutes before the others under Mojave in MS Word. This crap is purely limited to Apple's own applications.
Click to expand...
I just tested printing to a Canon MX920 printer from Preview, Safari, Mail, and TextEdit while running Mojave 10.14.1 (US English). The print dialog options have the same layout as they do in El Capitan 10.11.6. e.g. with multiple pages covering the print options. So this may be a localization issue for Mojave or the Canon print driver for the iP7200 series.

GetRealBro

FWIW I'm dual booting El Capitan and clean install of Mojave, while I check to see if Mojave is ready for prime time on our Macs/Apps
 
Ritsuka said:
Here's how it looks like when printing in Pages on one of my printers

https://imgur.com/mGnUqmb
Click to expand...
So, 10.14.2 is out and brought only minimal improvements for me. They cleaned up the layout of the list a little bit, but that's everything that happened. The not localised and duplicate entries are all still there and there is still no real logic in the order of the options.

getrealbro said:
So this may be a localization issue for Mojave or the Canon print driver for the iP7200 series.
Click to expand...
It's definitely a problem specific to certain types of printers (by now I've heard from others with completely different printers to have the same issues), but it's not related to the localisation: no matter what language you choose, the issue remains (plus/minus a few additional unlocalised options).
 
I've just upgraded to 10.14.2 and the print menu is still useless. At my work, we use authentication and the account track features on the printer to keep track of what we are printing. In the previous versions of Mac OS X, this opens a separate dialog. But in 10.14.x, it doesn't work and without the ability to enter an account code I cannot print at all. I'm saving everything as PDFs to print in Windows. I have to run Mojave to run Apple Configurator for configuring our corporate iPads but now I cannot print. What a mess!
 
Did anyone ever figure a fix for this mess? It's essentially blocking my printer to only work in one mode.
 

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I know this thread is a little old but I'm on 10.14.6 and my print menus look pretty normal. At least like the "before" photos above.
 
dwerg85 said:
Did anyone ever figure a fix for this mess? It's essentially blocking my printer to only work in one mode.
Click to expand...
Not sure what the problem is with that exactly, but if you change the setting from 'printer features' you'll get the old settings.
I have exactly the same interface as I've always had but it is very much program specific.
But I did go on the Canon site and updated the drivers myself maybe that's the difference
You can always have a look at the guttenberg drivers and see if you prefer those?
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
 
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