If you’re familiar with Windows, you know you can print a document from the desktop simply by right-clicking on it and choosing the print document option. If I recall, we had that option on the Mac back in OS9 and earlier. While we have Desktop printers, I don’t care for having more icons sitting on my Desktop. I also don’t care to have them in my Dock, so the drag & drop method is out too. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to get OSX to have a Print Document option in the contextual menus just a right-click away. All you need is Automator and 2 minutes of time:

1. Open Automator from your apps folder.
2. If a menu pops up asking what you want to do, select Custom.
3. In the Actions list on the far left, click Utilities.
4. In the list just to the right of that, double-click Print Finder Items.
5. The Print Finder Items box will pop-up on the far right of the Automator window.
6. Choose the printer you want to set up to print from the drop-down menu. Don’t worry about those tags underneath the drop-down menu.
7. Go to the File menu and select Save As Plugin…
8. Give it a name (probably something like “print to XYZ printer”, or something like that). Choose Finder from the drop-down menu.
9. That’s it. Now all you have to do is right click on a file in the Finder, scroll down to More>Automator>”name of your printer command”. The file will print.
10. There is no #10, but I like even numbers. If you really want a #10, you could repeat the process for each printer you have, or choose the PDF Printer driver from the list (if you have Acrobat Pro installed) to have a file converted to PDF without opening it, hitting print, and clicking the PDF button in the print dialog box.

I wish there was a way to have the Print option show up at the top level of the Finder’s contextual menu, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it. Still, it’s a much nicer solution than having icons for all your printers scattered on your desktop.