Without regular use, you'll find that sooner or later you will need to run your printer through a cleaning routine to get rid of smears, stripes, or other artifacts that can sometimes greatly affect the quality of your print jobs. Most printers contain some sort of head-cleaning routine that can help you do this, and while invoking these options can often be done via onboard printer controls, the ability to do so in OS X has been somewhat diminished.
While in the past some printer manufacturers issued drivers and utilities that contained controls for running cleaning routines, many now rely on Apple's CUPS and Gutenprint drivers for support in OS X, which largely do not contain options for invoking cleaning tools.
Even though it is not available in Apple's standard interfaces for printer management, if you would like to clean your printer then you may be able to do so using an alternative interface.
Apple's print system is the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which started as a project to bring a unified printing structure to Unix-based systems. Part of this project is a Web-based configuration interface that offers detailed configuration options for managing all aspects of the CUPS service, with one option being the ability to send a printer the command for cleaning its print heads.
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