Printers & Printing Preferences

After your printer hardware and software is configured, you may wish to check your printing settings on the machines at the practice. You can access these settings from ‘Devices and Printers’ through the Control Panel on a Windows machine:

On a Mac, you can access your printing settings on your machine from System Preferences > Printers and Scanners:

Please bear in mind that the locations above may differ depending on your exact operating system version.

After your printers are installed, you are ready to configure your printing settings in Genie. You can configure the default print settings in Genie from File > Printing Preferences.

Mac:

Windows:

The Printing Preferences window will allow you to select from the printers available to the computer using the dropdowns next to each of the twelve print jobs in the list.

Note: If the printer you would like to select isn't shown in your dropdown lists, it either isn't installed or isn't installed properly. You should firstly ensure that the printer is definitely available on your machine and that you can print to it externally to Genie.

When the printer has been set, additional options such as the tray to print from can be set by clicking the Page Setup button (Mac) or Trays dropdown (windows).

Mac:

Windows:

If automatic tray selection doesn't work as expected on your printer, you should select the ‘Ask for Print Settings’ checkbox, so that it can be selected manually in the Print Dialogue window that appears. More on using this tick box later.

In the Printing Preferences window you will see the name of the computer you are using listed at the top as well as its IP address. To the right of this is a preference for ‘Separate Preferences for each Genie user on this computer’. This setting is particularly helpful for users accessing Genie in a Terminal Services (TS) environment, as well as, potentially, if multiple Genie users access this machine but they would prefer to have different printer and/or tray selections.

TS users need to have ‘Separate Preferences for each Genie user on this computer’ ticked because they are accessing different sessions on what is essentially the same machine. The setting allows each individual user’s preferences to be respected. Further to this, there is a checkbox in the Practice Preferences > Clinical tab to 'Set Printing by User Name' which drastically simplifies the logic involved in printing in a TS environment.

Please note: when 'Set Printing by User Name' is ticked, this will clear out the current printing preferences for Genie on the machine and these will need to be reset.

‘Always Print to Default Printer’ at the bottom of the Printing Preferences window, as the name suggests, will ensure your system ignores any Genie settings and instead only uses the printer that is set as the default on your computer.

DVA Claims: This will print a form for the patient to sign when submitting a DVA claim.

Medicare DB4: This will print a form for the patient to sign when submitting a Medicare claim.

Offsite Printer: This is the printer that can be specified if the computer is being used away from the network (Genie Solo).

Adjust Print Area: The four green and blue arrows at the bottom left of this window are used to adjust the position of printed text on prescriptions, this does NOT apply to any other document types.

The ‘Ask for Print Settings’ tick box which appears to the right of the print jobs in the Printing Preferences window enables the printer’s interface to appear after you opt to print from Genie. Once the print button or printer icon has been clicked within Genie, another series of windows will appear that are generated by the printer software outside Genie. These windows will allow you to specify not only different printers but, if available, different trays at the time of printing. The settings you specify only relate to the print job when you clicked on the print button, however, if the ‘Ask for Print Settings’ box remains ticked, the windows will reappear the next time the particular document type is printed.

Plain A4 and Letters will always open the Print Dialogue window when printing, therefore this option is not available for these documents. Note: If you would like to select ‘Ask for Print Settings’ for all types of documents at the same time, Alt+click on the first checkbox and Genie will automatically select all of them.

It can be a very useful tick box to ensure that if the printer settings you want to use change regularly, you can ensure the right settings have been selected. Another benefit of having this setting ticked is as a ‘speedbump’ to sending something to the printer. For example, if you have selected to print something from Genie when you didn’t mean to, having the printer interface window appear will give you an opportunity to cancel or alter the print job before it sends to the printer.

If this sounds like it will slow you down or annoy you, it may suit you better to have ‘Ask for Print Settings’ unticked on any of the print jobs you like.

Having ‘Ask for Print Settings’ ticked also means that if you would prefer to print to PDF for print jobs, you can choose to do so either by selecting from the PDF dropdown to ‘Save as/print to PDF’ in the printer interface window (Mac) or selecting a PDF printer that you have installed on your Windows machine.

More on printing to PDF in the next section.

For now, once you have chosen your printing preferences, don’t forget the final step, which is to save them by clicking the Save Preferences button at the bottom of the printing preferences window.

In the interests of moving towards a paperless practice, the ability to print to PDF is an incredibly handy feature. How you will go about printing to PDF depends on your operating system (whether you use a Windows or a Mac machine).

On Mac machines, this feature is built into the interface window (which will appear when you click on the Print button in Genie if you have ‘Ask for Print Settings’ ticked in Printing Preferences against the specific print job you are trying to print).

For PDF printing on Windows machines, as mentioned earlier in this article, you will firstly need to have a PDF printer program installed, such as a third party program like CutePDF or Foxit PDF. However, if you are using a Windows 10 operating system, Microsoft Print to PDF comes as standard and does not need to be installed. You simply need to choose this PDF printer option from the list of printers. In fact, some Genie users on Windows machines set their PDF printer as the default printer for some jobs in their File > Printing Preferences window.

In Genie you will notice multiple different ways to print in the different areas of Genie. But which one should you use?

As a good rule of thumb, if the printer icon  is present in the area of Genie you are trying to print from, use this. In many instances, this will not be available, in which case you often will have a button that says . You can use this instead.

In rarer cases, your only print option may be making use of a different looking printer icon . Try to avoid using this icon if the regular printer icon is available, as it references the printer preferences set on the computer rather than your Genie File > Printing Preferences, which can lead to confusion and mistakes.

In certain areas of Genie you will have access to the File > Print… menu in what is known as the ‘4DWrite’ area of Genie:

You may find this menu helpful particularly for letter templates when they don’t appear to be formatted to print on A4 page size (which you can change through the Page Setup… option. More on this in the Troubleshooting section). It is also another way to produce the printer interface window before you print.

Similarly, you may also encounter the QPix menu in patient clinical windows when previewing PDF and image attachments:

Again, this menu references the printing settings on your computer rather than in Genie and can help you access the printer interface window before printing.

There are literally dozens of things that can go wrong with printing ranging from the simple (e.g. the printer isn’t switched on) to the complex (e.g. a corrupted printer driver). So despite our best laid plans with configuration, you may have to conduct troubleshooting from time to time.

Note: Before calling the Genie Support line, please perform the simple diagnostic steps below to at least exclude some common problems.

1. Switch the printer off and on again. If there is a blockage in the queue this may clear it.
2. Check the printer queue to see if there is a blockage that has stopped printing. On Mac computers, open the Print Centre utility at /Applications/Utilities/Printer Setup Utility/. In fact, it’s a good idea to create a shortcut to the Print Centre in your Dock. On Windows, select Start > Devices and Printers and open the relevant printer.
3. Check the cabling, unplug and re-insert the cable at either end
4. Reselect the printer in Genie’s Printing Preferences. You should also confirm the correct tray and page setup has been selected.
5. Try printing from another application. If you can’t, the problem is with your printer, not Genie.
6. Try printing from another computer on the network.

Occasionally, the Printing Preferences record in Genie may become corrupted. You might see the result of this behaviour in Genie when your printing preferences are not being respected despite following the instructions in this article to the letter. In this case, you can delete the printing preferences record to ‘reset’ or ‘refresh’ these preferences.

If you need to delete printing preferences it's important to keep in mind that you are deleting more things than just the preferences in the File > Printing Preferences Window. There are some other areas in Genie affected that will need to be re-added/linked based on the operating system you are using.

For safety, we recommend noting down the settings in the Printing Preferences window, perhaps with the aid of a screen shot so that you have a visual reference of these preferences. (Mac: Shift+Cmmd+3 creates a screen shot image file on the Desktop. Win: Ctrl+PrtScr then Ctrl+V into a Word Doc)

Windows

1. If you use Batch Scanning in Genie - Go to Special > Image Pro Control. If there is a blue file path in the top left of this window, please note it down (as you will need to reselect this afterwards).
2. If you Import Remotely-typed Letters in Genie - Go to Open > Import Transcribed Letters. If there is a blue file path in the top left of this window, please note it down (as you will need to reselect this afterwards).
3. If you have Ghostscript installed on a Windows computer - Go to Special > Image Pro Control. Note down the pathway listed next to the ‘Where is Ghostscript’ button. This is usually C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.xx\bin\gsdll32.dll if you accepted the default installation
4. Then proceed to:

• File > Printing Preferences
• Click Delete > Delete
• Re-select your preferences as they were previously, and click Save

Mac

1. If you use Batch Scanning in Genie - Go to Special > Image Pro Control. If there is a blue file path in the top left of this window, please note it down (as you will need to reselect this afterwards).
2. If you Import Remotely-typed Letters in Genie - Go to Open > Import Transcribed Letters. If there is a blue file path in the top left of this window, please note it down (as you will need to reselect this afterwards).

Once you have confirmed the details above, you can delete the Printing Preferences by following these steps:

1. Go to File > Printing Preferences
2. Click Delete > Delete
3. Re-select your preferences as they were previously, and click Save