Print Management Guide - How Can Students Use Print Quota Efficiently
All students are allocated a quota for black & white printing of academic work. The quota for
undergraduate and postgraduate students are:
Undergraduate students 200 black & white A4 pages per term
Postgraduate students 400 black & white A4 pages per term
The quotas are reset each term (unused quota is not carried over) and are sufficient for normal academic printing requirements. However, you may find that you are using up your quota a lot quicker through personal printing and spotting mistakes after you print.
Here are some helpful hints on how students can use print quota more efficiently to make it last longer:
1. Using the Spelling and Grammar Check
Before you print out a document (such as from Microsoft Word) it is highly recommended that you run the ‘Spelling and Grammar’ check tool. This will alert you to any words in your document that are not recognized as dictionary words, so you can correct spelling mistakes before printing. The Spelling and Grammar tool can run from the drop-down menu ‘Tools’ ‘Spelling and Grammar…’.
2. Using Print Preview
Most applications (such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Internet Explorer) give you the option to preview what you printed file will look like on screen before you print it out onto paper. This can be very useful as you can spot layout and formatting errors in print preview and correct them before printing to paper. The Print Preview tool can run from the drop-down menu ‘File’ Print Preview’. It is particularly useful when printing from Web pages, as sometimes you may find that the end of every line of text is cut off when the page is printed, giving an incomplete, useless printout. Using print preview you can see this and rectify it before printing out onto paper. There are 2 ways to do this:
1. Copy and paste all the text into a text editor.
2. Scale down the page from ‘File’ ‘Print…’, select the ‘Effects’ tab and modify the slider bar for the ‘% of Normal Size’.
PrinterAdmin Print Polisher allow print preview when you print from any application.
3. Printing Options
3.1 Selecting The Right Printer (Black & White or Colour)
Rather than clicking the 'Print' toolbar button, it's best to print via 'File' menu 'Print'. Check that that the right print queue is selected in the 'Printer' 'Name' box (see picture below). The two available queues are: “\PRINTSERVERLJ4050-SpoolQueue” for black & white printing “\PRINTSERVERColour-SpoolQueue” for colour printing.
3.2 Print Selection
Rather than printing a whole document or Web page just for a little bit of information in it, this option allows you to select the specific part you want. It is particularly useful when printing information from a Web page (accidentally printing a multi-page Web document when only wanting the first page is the most common way of wasting print quota). To print only part of a Web page, highlight (click the left mouse button and drag) the text &/or pictures you wish to print, go to ‘File’ ‘Print…’ and in the ‘Page Range’ section select the radio button for ‘Selection’ (see picture below). Now you should find only the part that you highlighted is printed and not the entire file.
3.3 Multiple Pages Per Sheet
This option is very effective for saving your print quota. It allows you to print multiple scaled down pages on one sheet of paper. For example, if you selected ‘4 pages’, instead of printing 4 pages over 4 sheets of paper you print 4 scaled down pages on only 1 sheet saving you 3 pages on your quota. Using Microsoft Office applications you can select this option by going to ‘File’ -> ‘Print…’ and selecting between 1 to 16 pages from the ‘pages per sheet’ field in the ‘Zoom’ section. If you are printing from Internet Explorer go to ‘File’ -> ‘Print…’ and select the ‘Finishing’ tab.
4. Log Off
When you have finished your session on the computer, make sure you log off. If you leave yourself logged on you are susceptible to other you using your account and using your print quota.
5. Use Print Release Station or Popup Confirmation
Print Release Station is installed next to the printer and holds the print jobs until student releases the jobs. The print jobs can be released by the student’s identity or password to improve confidentiality.
The popup confirmation (Print Job Agent) allows student to confirm print jobs on the workstation (Windows, Mac OSX/Classic, or Linux client) before they actually print.
