The buried Mac setting that can save your inkjet's color ink

It feels like my Canon Pixma inkjet is perpetually low on ink -- color ink, in particular. One of the three color ink tanks seems to be always low or out of ink.

I often print a document in color when I don't need to because the grayscale option is buried in Preview's print window. If it were on the main Preview screen of the OS X Preview app, I'd check the box for most of my print jobs because my printer has an extra black ink cartridge that keeps me in business for monochrome jobs.

Because it hides out of sight, however, and I don't print that frequently, I never can remember where it is.

If you want a reminder of where the grayscale check box is hiding in the Preview app, this post is for you (and me).

To print a document in black-and-white from the Preview app in OS X, you need to find the Grayscale Printing option. For reasons that escape me, it's not among the many options and settings listed in the default Preview view for my Canon inkjet. Instead, I must click on the Preview option and select Quality & Media from the pull-down menu. Then on the Quality & Media page, I need to check the box for Grayscale Printing.

This is the option for Canon printers. If you know where to find the grayscale printing option for other printer models, please share in the comments below.

Editors' note, July 14, 2014: This article was updated to reflect the fact that the layout of the print screen varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even model to model within the same manufacturer.