RCC4 Printing Policy
ER4 provides laser printing to its users free of additional charge.
The engineering technology fee does not pay for it. By rule, student
fee money may not be used for recurring costs such as paper and toner
for printers. Instead, the college provides an operations fund that is
used to purchase such supplies.
To help ensure that the "free" printing arrangement is not abused,
printing quotas have been established. Here are the things you
should be aware of concerning printing quotas:
All accounts will have printing quotas on them. The quota
given to all accounts is the same. Each quarter, every ECE account is
allocated 500 pages of soft print quota.
Once the soft quota is exhausted, no additional soft quota will allocated
until the beginning of the next quarter. Unused soft print quota will
not carry forward into the following quarter. -
Users who exceed their initial allotment may purchase additional
"hard" print quota. Hard quotas carry forward from one quarter to the
next. Soft quotas are reset at the beginning of each quarter. Soft
quota is always consumed before any hard quota.
Hard print quota may be acquired through a barter system.
There are currently two items that may be bartered for quota:
An official HP printer cartridge for the HP Laserjet 4300. Only HP
part number Q1339A will be accepted. Refurbished, used, pre-owned, or
other brand cartridges will not be accepted. This cartridge can be
exchanged for 10,000 pages of print quota. A ream (500 pages) of official HP laserjet printer paper. Only HP
part numbers HPM1120 and HPE1120 will be accepted. Other brand, or other
HP paper, may not be accepted. This ream of paper can be exchanged for
160 pages of print quota.
The bartered item should be given to a member of the site staff
(offices on the 5th floor of Dreese). While RCC4
will not endorse any one vendor over another, local stores such as
MicroCenter and Staples are known to carry these items. If a person
prefers to order supplies on the Internet, best prices can be found
using such services as PriceGrabber.com.
In the case of a print cartridge, the 10,000 pages may be split
among multiple users. The person exchanging the cartridge may
provide a list of usernames who will share the pages and the number
of pages to be assigned to each. Once the hard quota pages are
allocated, they will not be reallocated or transfered to other
users and there are no refunds.
The 160/10,000 exchange rate is based on a $0.015 cost per page
divided into what the facilities pay for a ream of paper or toner
cartridge. It is thus based on the "value" that such an item as to
the labs... not necessarily what the student actually paid for the
item.
(Policy effective April 1996, amended barter values March 2006)
- You can see how much hard, soft, and total print quota remains for your
account by entering the command 'pquota' on any Unix workstation.
- The printing quota guidelines were established by the department's
Computing Committee. All students have
representatives on this committee.
- If you feel that your printing quota was erroneously charged, we can look
into it. Send email to
site
telling us:
- The name of the file you printed (where we can find it).
- The program which created this file.
- Which printer you sent it to.
- Any other possibly relevant information.
- The printing services provided by ER4 are not intended for the
printing of books or extensive documentation. Instructors should use
printing resources such as Cop-EZ or Kinko's for distributing lecture
notes to students.
- Note: OIT public labs also have printing facilities.
Things to Know About the Files You Print
The printing subsystem will send only PostScript and PCL files to the
printers. If the file you submit is not PostScript or PCL, plaintext (ASCI)
will be assumed and it will be converted to PostScript automatically and
transparently to you. PCL files are processed only if the 'lp -opcl' command
is used.
A PostScript file ALWAYS has the characters %PS as its
first 3 characters. Anything else is NOT PostScript.
If you are creating PostScript files at home with a word processor or some
other package, be sure to use a generic PostScript printer driver when you
print the file to disk. In lieu of a generic PostScript driver you can should
try an older Apple printer driver - not an HP one. Then check the file with
and editor (Emacs) to be sure %PS are the first three
characters. Many of the public domain software packages currently support the
Adobe PostScript Level 2 language.
Regarding Duplex Printers
During summer quarter 2003, the HP LaserJet 4300dtn became the
standard printer model in the ER4 labs. This feature is provided for
those who wish to save on paper use and who may just prefer two-sided
printing.
It must be noted that a two-sided piece of paper is counted as 2
pages by the printer. As such it counts as two pages against a users
print quota. Additionally if duplex printing is enabled for a print
job that has an odd number of pages, the printer will round the print
count UP to the nearest even number. Thus both a 3 page and a 4 page
printout done in duplex mode will consume two physical pieces of paper,
and both will count as four pages against the users print quota.
This bug/feature is a limitation of the hardware and cannot be
overcome at this time.
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