You Are Not Done Yet: Printing

You are not done testing yet unless...you have checked how your application handles printing. If you remember back to the Bad Old Days before your operating system abstracted away (most of) the differences between printers, so that each application had to know intimate details about every printer it might be used with, you surely know how good you have it. That just gives you more time to worry about the following issues.

• Verify changing orientation works properly. Try doing this for a brand new document and for an in-progress document. Also try doing this by launching your app's equivalent of a page setup dialog box both directly (e.g., from a menu item) and from within the print dialog.
• Verify printing to a local printer works properly.
• Verify printing to a network printer works properly.
• Verify printing to a file works properly. Every operating system I know of allows you to create a print file for any printer you have installed.
• Verify printing to a PCL printer works properly. PCL started out as the control language for Hewlett-Packard printers but has since become somewhat of a standard.
• Verify printing to a PostScript printer works properly. This printer control language was created by Adobe and has also become somewhat of a standard. PostScript is semi-human readable, so you can do some printer testing by inspecting the output file and thus avoid killing any trees.
• Verify printing to a PDF file works properly. There are a number of free and low-cost PDF creators available; also consider purchasing a copy of Adobe Acrobat in order to test the "official" way to create PDFs.
• Verify canceling an in-progress print job works properly. My current printer pretends to let me cancel, but then pages come spitting out anyway. Frustrating!
• Verify setting each print option your application supports has the proper effect; number of copies, collation, and page numbering, for example.
• Verify setting printer-specific options works properly. These settings should be orthogonal to your application's print settings, but you never know.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink