Default Printer Settings in iWork Pages

This week I discovered something peculiar at school while using iWork Pages. Pages has its own default printer settings, and it doesn't necessarily go by what your computer has set for default printer. In a networked environment, like a school, or even a home with more than one printer, this can get a bit annoying. I thought it was just my computer being wacky, not that my macbook pro would ever behave in such a manner, until someone else noticed this and emailed me about it. So, as I often do when I don't know the answer to a troubleshooting problem on the computers, I "googled" it. (Isn't it funny words become added to our vernacular? I mean 20 years ago, if you used that as a verb, people would say - you did what?!) This is what I found:

Pages defaults its print settings to the first printer in your printer list. As I said, this could get a bit bothersome if you are in a networked environment, like a school setting, where every classroom has a network printer. You could end up printing to the other end of the school without even realizing it if you are quick to hit the print button.

Fortunately, there is a way to fix this. Create a new document in Pages. You don't even have to type anything in it really. Hit print, then browse your printer list to find the printer you would like Pages to default to. Print your new document to your preferred printer, then save your document. From this point forward, any new document you create in Pages will default to this printer when printed. (If you change the printer, though, to say, like, a color printer, and, then save the document after it is printed to the newly changed printer, the new printer will then be your default printer.)

However, this default printer setting does not apply to any documents that were previously created and saved. These will all have to be changed as you open and print them the first time through. If you save them again after you change the printer to your preferred printer, they will then be saved with the default printer setting being saved to your preferred printer.