Lightroom Export vs Print to File???

[nickt]

I'm doing some Lightroom 5 learning tonight. Specifically trying to get myself a good understanding on preparing an image for printing at a lab. Exporting seems reasonably straight forward to me. But then I read that some folks alternatively print to jpg for uploading to a lab. I can't find a good explanation of why someone would print to file vs export. It would make sense if I wanted a contact sheet, but are there any other reasons why I would print a single image to a file rather than exporting it?

I just gave printing to a file a quick try. I could only get full page jpg's, in other words, lots of white around my 4x6 image to fill a whole letter size page. So I'm thinking print to jpg is tied to my printer paper settings, maybe other settings too. That makes me wonder even more why someone would upload the print to file output to a lab. I'm very uncomfortable in the print module so that doesn't help either. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. If anybody can give me a quick rundown on when/why to print to file that would be great. Thanks!

 

[WhiteLight]

Though they seem to be relatively similar, they really are 2 entirely different processes.
Print to file is used when you have the final image, with layouts, maybe more than one image or whatever effect you might want on paper..

Export is not limited to JPG, but a lot more formats.
Plus export option does not retain any page layout etc..
Print to JPG would retain printing layout for a file and embed them in a JPG.

 

[nickt]

Thanks Whitelight, your explanation makes sense. I didn't save the links of what I read last night that confused me, but they did confuse. One guy made it sound like everyone might as well print to file because its easier than exporting. Another guy made it sound like they were equivalent choices. I'll stick to an export for simple lab prints and work on getting more comfortable with the print module and creating layouts. Thanks for the reply.