Department of Engineering

Saving Paper

When we introduced print-quotas in October 2005 we discovered that we had to backtrack on some paper-saving measures. In particular, we had to produce a "banner page" (an extra identification page) for each job. With newer printers we hope to revert to a situation where "banner pages" are automatically suppressed when we know it's safe to do so. Meanwhile, you can

• Encourage teaching staff who are running labs to offer paper-efficient methods of output.
• Take care not to waste paper yourself.
• Send suggestions to comments

Because so many programs on the system have their own way of printing out, we can't offer a single perfect solution, but here are some tips.

• DON'T print out anything unless it's necessary. If your output doesn't appear when you expect it to, do not just try sending it again. Find out why it failed to print, and only send it again when you are sure that you haven't printed it to a different printer than the one you expected. Do not hassle the operators unless you've first checked your mail and viewed the printer queues online.
• DO use double-sided output (it's the default anyway)
• DO try to print more than 1 page on each side of paper. psnup puts multiple pages of a postscript file onto each physical sheet of paper. To produce 4-up output (4 pages per sheet) from a file called filename.ps, type "psnup -4 filename.ps | lp -dljmr". To print out an A5 booklet from a postscript file "doc.ps" use "booklet doc.ps". Note that you can produce a Postscript file from acroread by doing "Print to file".
• DON'T print out a whole document when you only need a page or 2. Both acroread (for PDF files) and gv (for Postscript files) have page-range options. To select pages from Postscript documents, you can use psselect from the command line - for example, "psselect -p1,2,10-20 doc.ps | lp -dljmr" prints pages 1,2 and 10-20 of doc.ps.

In 2009 the system was changed so that consecutive print-outs by the same user to the same printer get a single banner page.