Copying printer preset .plist files (Mavericks)
It turns out that preferences are cached in Mavericks (and presumably Yosemite), and therefore copying preference files will not make them immediately available.

A generic cache cleaning tool such as Onyx can be used to clear the caches or if you're happy using the command line the following command will reload the cached preferences:

killall -u &lt;yourusername&gt; cfprefsd 


Thanks to the MacOS Hints Forums for this useful gem.