I have a HP Photosmart 7200 Series Ink Jet printer. It’s convenient that OS X has what seems to be every printer driver under the sun installed as part of its system so you can plug in almost every printer and have it work (except a stupid all-in-one Dell printer my fiancee has). So more times than not, as long as all of the cords are plugged in, my printer works the way I want it to. That was until today.

The color cartridge in my printer is shot. Hardly any color comes out on the paper at all. Since I’m cheap, I haven’t gone out to the store to purchase a replacement yet. I needed to print a gift certificate from a web site for dinner tonight, but it wouldn’t print properly since the color cartridge was trying to print the parts of the document I really needed (a certificate # to be specific).

So, I did some Googling to find out how to just print in black & white. You’d think this would be simple since OS X is so easy to use, right? Not quite. It turns out, to print in black & white you have to do the following:

• Save the page as PDF
• Open in Preview
• CMD+Print to open the Print Dialog
• Click Paper Type/Quality
• Click Color Options
• Select the Black Printer Cartridge Only radio button

Now, I understand this might be a little out of the norm, but I think it should be way easier to do this from the browser than going through all these steps. Maybe I missed something along the way, but this was the only way I could get black only printing to work. Hopefully this is helpful for someone else out there who’s having the same issue.