Set the Epson Print Monitor to launch in the background

Sep 08, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: jtoly

My wife's Epson RX680 is used by everyone in the house via printer sharing, so she gets pretty annoyed when the Epson Print Monitor pops up suddenly on top of whatever she's working on. Today she made it annoy me enough so that I had to figure out a proper fix. The fix is to tell Launch Services to launch it in the background.

This requires editing a file within the application Epson Print Monitor, so be sure to back this application up first! The file to back up is /Library » Printers » EPSON » EPW » EPSON Printer Monitor.app.

Once that's backed up, Control-click on it and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu. In the Contents folder, you'll see the Info.plist file; we're going to add a new key, LSBackgroundOnly, specifying that this should be true (i.e. launch in the background).

I use the pico editor from within Terminal:

pico /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/EPW/EPSON Printer Monitor.app/Contents/Info.plist
Down towards the bottom of the file, just above the LSMinimumSystemVersion key, and add two new lines:
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<true/>
For clarity, here are the key above, the new key and the key below:
CSResourcesFileMapped</key>
<true/>
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<true/>
<key>LSMinimumSystemVersion</key>
<string>10.5.0</string>
Save the changes; if using pico, Control-X and y for yes, then hit Return.

That's it! Now when other people print to your printer, the Epson Print Monitor will still launch, but it will do so behind whatever you're working on. This was tested on 10.5.8 -- we haven't updated her to Snow Leopard yet because her hard drive needs to be backed up first!

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