Printing

Overview

All of our printers are now configured to be accessed through a single network address of "scroll.stanford.edu" controlled by our CUPS Server Each printer appears as one or more print queues on "scroll" both to Unix machines via "lpr", "xpp", or "kprinter" and to Windows machines via Samba or "ipp". With a single machine holding the print spool, everyone can now see the complete queue for each printer (with lpq) and can more easily cancel (with lprm) jobs submitted from your workstation. Things are somewhat less functional from windows (and the exact level of functionality changes from time to time). You can use the web interface to cancel your job, or authenticate as root and cancel or hold any jobs.

Printers

The following printers are available (the links shown are to the printers embedded webserver which is only available on campus):

offset	HP LaserJet 4250n PS 1200 dpi 25 ppm duplex Postscript printer (pennies/page) Third floor printer for high-volume printing
linotype	HP LaserJet 4100dn PS 1200 dpi 25 ppm duplex Postscript printer (pennies/page) Second floor printer for high-volume printing
tone	HP Color LaserJet 3800 PS 600 dpi 22 ppm duplex color Postscript printer (dimes/page) Third floor color printer for transparencies, drafts of papers, research reports from the web
hue	HP Color LaserJet 4500 PS 600 dpi 4 ppm duplex color Postscript printer (dimes/page) basement iRoom color printer for transparencies, drafts of papers, research reports from the web

Printer Supplies

Printer supplies are in the printer alcove and should be pretty obvious. Spent toner cartridges should be returned to Gates 368 for recycling. Likewise, if you use one of the last toners or other supplies, tell Ada so she can reorder.

Manuals for the printers are kept in the cabinet across from them in 361. Especially when dealing with the fancier printers, you should read the manual because there are often routine maintenance tasks (like swabbing parts with alcohol) which must be done when reloading supplies other than paper.

Plain paper is stocked in the drawers below the printers, but the main supplies are in the 377 copy room at the end of the wing.

Print manufacturers make their money on supplies and sadly the printers usually start blinking and complaining about low toner or ink when there's still 20% left. Therefore, we generally ignore the warnings and only replace supplies when the actual print quality has deteriorated.

Installing

All print jobs are sent to the spooling system on scroll which maintains a unified queue for each printer. Thus setting up a printer mainly involves telling the operating system how to find the printer.

Linux
Linux printers are accessed through the Common Unix Printing Systems (CUPS) by pointing the local CUPS system at scroll. To do this add a line in /etc/cups/client.conf:
ServerName scroll.stanford.edu
This line is added automatically if you install the graphics version of CentOS.
Macintosh
Open up the "Print & Fax" preference pane. Click the "+" to add a new printer. In the resulting dialog, choose "IP Printer" and enter the following information:
- Protocol: Line Printer Daemon - LPD
- Address: scroll.stanford.edu
- Queue: Name of the printer, for example offset
- Name: Name of the printer, for example offset
- Location: Leave Blank
- Print Using: Select make and model of printer. For example, for offset, choose "HP" and then "HP LaserJet 4250".
Then, click Add. Depending on the printer, you will likely be presented with an additional dialog to select installed options. For offset and hue, you'll want to check the "Duplex Unit" option.

Additionally, you can use the lp, lpstat and cancel commands from the terminal to print (even if you haven't installed the printer). For example:
$ enscript -p - myfile.txt | lp -d offset -h scroll.stanford.edu -
will print "myfile.txt" to offset.
Windows
Configuring printing in Windows depends primarily on whether a machine is always on campus or not.
- On campus
  For machines which are permanently located on campus, printing via the Windows SMB protocol is the most convenient because all the printer attributes can be automatically set by the Samba server. A simple way to set up is to use the Start Menu->Run and enter \\scroll in the command box. This will pop up an Explorer window (as you might imagine there are several other ways to get to this point) and once you select a printer, it will prompt you to set it up.
- Drivers
  Except for the HP DesignJet, most drivers are in the default Windows XP distribution so things are likely to go through automatically. However, if your system does not have them, drivers for all our printers can be found in folders for each Windows variant under \\SCROLL\drivers.
- Setting Printing Defaults
  After the install, you can use the "Properties" dialog to describe details about the printer's capabilities, e.g. duplexing. One thing worth doing, especially if you print large jobs, is to set the print scheduling to go "directly" to the printer. This avoids spooling the jobs on your local disk since they'll be spooled on scroll anyway.
  To set device defaults, select (highlight) a printer, pull-down "File" and "Document Defaults" and you can set things like duplex or grayscale. This is important since Windows always configures the printer for each job, so even though the laser printer "offset" is normally set in duplex, you can default to single-sided printing in Windows.
  Set the defaults you want as you can override them for single documents easily in the Print dialogs of applications like Word.
  The list of all jobs in the print queue is available for each printer. You may cancel any jobs that you own before they print.

Printing Tips

Printing from Unix

Printing is no longer available from Irix as more functionality is available on Linux.

The CUPS system provides command replacements for both the traditional Unix lpr (BSD) and lp (SysV) printing subsystems. The lpstat command provides many options for looking and printer and job status. A quick summary can be obtained with:

lpstat -o -v
which might, for example show:

backface-3141 descartes 14336 Sat 17 Jan 2004 11:18:43 AM PST
The user descartes can remove that job with:

cancel 3141 backface

There are a number of printer GUIs available for Linux. The nicest at the moment is kprinter which is part of the KDE package (and is the default printing dialog of any KDE program). You can use it from within other programs by using "kprinter" as the printer command (use "kprinter --stdin" if the program pipes the input to the print command). The program xpp also has similar functionality, but a much uglier interface. However, it does not require KDE.

Printing Plaintext Files

Since CUPS abstracts printing as postscript, you can use any one of a number of utilities to reformat text. Many of these provide for rotated, 2up, and 4up printing. See the man pages for imprint, lptops, enscript, a2ps etc.

To quickly print text files 2up, use:

     a2ps -2 file.txt

Transparencies

To print transparencies, make sure you load the right stock into the printer. This is relatively easy since we always use the supplies from the manufacturer, e.g. HP, Apple, or Kodak.

On "hue", transparencies shouldn't be put into the tray. Rather, you should open both the auxiliary input and output tray doors on the right side to feed and retrieve the slides. This method shortens and straightens the paper path through the printer so that you minimize crumpling.

Printing to special paper

If you want to print to special paper (for example 3 hole punch paper) the proper thing to do is to use the manual feed tray. To do this using lpr, add "-o inputslot=manualfeed" to your lpr command (on linux only). For windows, kprinter, xpp, just select manual feed in the printer setting dialog.
Note:On backface and other HP 4100s, the paper width sliders must be all the way in to the middle to close the manual feed tray.

"offset" doesn't wait very long for you to load paper into the manual feed tray, so load your paper before printing (this can change if people complain). Backface will pause when the manual feed job is to be printed and waits until either paper is loaded or the big round button is pushed.

Problems?

The CUPS server at scroll is Linux machine in the printer alcove. Its webserver shows the current status and the queues for each printer.

Common Epson Problems

Spewing garbage

If an inkjet printer gets out of sync with the server and starts spewing gibberish, it's often not enough to power cycle just the printer. This is because the little local network HP print server buffers data. A thorough reset can be done by:

Turn off the printer to stop the spewing
Unplug the power cable to the HP print server
Turn the printer back on and wait for it come to a ready state
Plug the power cable back into the print server

Print Quality

For Siggraph pictures, the default driver settings on Windows machines are likely not to be set at a high enough resolution or the right paper. These settings are found in the Properties dialog for the printer under

Printing Preferences->(Custom radio button)->Advanced
The C80 printers should also be set to have sRGB Color Managment.

The 90 percentile problem for quality on the Epson is clogged nozzles. The Printing Preferences has a Utility tab with Nozzle Check, Head Cleaning, andd Print Head Alignment functions. Running the Head Cleaning several times nearly always works.

Checking Supplies

Most printers have embedded webservers available to on-campus IPs. If you connect to the webserver, you can see the current local status and supply situation.

The Epson utility for showing ink levels only works for locally attached printers, but you can still see the ink levels on the Epson inkjets:

Power off the printer
Hold the Paper button down
Press and hold the Power button until it blinks
Release both buttons

A single page will print showing the ink levels and head alignment.

For other problems, send e-mail to support.