A Little Knowledge Can Be Enough in a Pinch

You can print a document more ways then clicking the printer icon at the top of the tool bar. It works well enough for most people, most of the time. Unfortunately, there are those other times too. How much do you and your coworkers really know about using your printers? Most printer users only learn the bare minimum they need to get documents from their desktops to paper. That usually involves creating or opening a file.

How many times do you get more pages than you want, when it seems to take forever to print the job you sent, when you find a lot of stuff on the page that you didn’t want, when the color you see on paper doesn’t match the color on your screen, when printouts are streaked, smeared, speckled or have missing text, when a page emerges completely blank, or when the printer won’t produce anything at all? We’ve all been there – usually when we need a perfect document RIGHT NOW! To deal with these problems, you may need to know a bit more than your system administrator’s extension number.

Depending on the problem, you may need to understand the printing options of your operating system and software applications. Knowing how to replace a print driver could come in handy. Understanding your printer’s capabilities and basic operation might help

To give you a head start, we’ve dedicated this newsletter to tips and tricks that will help you prevent problems, solve problems when they occur and get your jobs printed more easily and efficiently. If you run into problems you can’t solve, give us a call! ■

If you’ve ever opened up the Print option under the File menu, which most of us have, you may remember having seen an option to “Print to file”. Ever wondered why you would do that?

By clicking this option, you would send your document not to a printer but to a .prn formatted file. In fact, your printer driver creates a .prn file whenever it sends something to print — you just never see it. This file includes all the instructions to get your document from your application to your printer — which paper size you want, which paper tray to print from, what to print, how to print, and so on. If you actually experiment by sending a document “Print to file” and then open the document, you’ll see all kinds of ‘jibberish’ coding that represents those instructions.

Once you have a .prn file, you can print the file without running (or even having) the application you printed from. (Think about how quickly applications and versions become outdated, and you’ll realize the value of a .prn file.) It’s a useful way to print a document exactly the same way every time, from just about any system.

You will, however, need a utility to get your .prn file to a printer. A free program called “PrnPrint” lets you print not only .prn files, but .txt (text) and .ps (postscript) files too. “PrintFile” is another freeware Windows utility that recognizes .prn as well as .ps, .eps (encapsulated postscript) and binary files, allowing you to send them directly to a printer.

Run a search on the Internet to find one of these utilities, download it, and you’ll have another valuable printing trick at your disposal. Freeware such as PrintFile make it easy to get your files to the printer. ■

If you’re in the market for a general office laser that prints color and wide format (11 x 17), look no further. The HP Color Laser Jet 5550 series has it all – starting at less than $3,500.

• Speeds up to 27 ppm in black and color
• Up to 120,000 pages monthly volume
• Up to 5 input trays
• Paper input capacity up to 2,100 sheets
• 160 MB memory standard
• Many add-on options.

Need more volume? Check out the HP Color Laser Jet 9500 series, that can handle 200,000 prints per month, starting at just under $6,000. Whatever type of printing machine you’re looking for, we can provide it for you with complete installation and support services. Give us a call!

Get Web Pages Your Way

Printing a full web page can use up a lot of ink and toner on a lot of stuff you really don’t want. Fortunately, Internet Explorer allows you to get rid of some or all of the Header and Footer information. Here’s how:

1. Open the web page you want, then go to the toolbar’s File menu and click on Page Setup.
2. Delete all the characters from in the Headers and Footers fields, then click OK. Now, go ahead and print. The Header and Footer information won’t show up!

If you want some, but not all, of the information in the Headers and Footers, type the characters below in one of the fields (and check out the IE Help menu to find out more):

&w Window title &P Total number of pages
&u URL &u Page address (URL)
&d Date in short format &D Date in long format
&t Time in 12-hour format &T Time in 24-hour format
&p Current page number

Read EcoPrint News each month for timely
tips on printing and environmental news.

More Pages Please!

If you’ve ever designed a document, printed it, then found some text or graphics was cut off by the margins of the page, you’ve run into you’re printer’s “unprintable area.” Or have you?

It’s true that most printers do not have ‘full bleed’ capacity; that is, they can’t print to the edge of the page. Your printer may be able to print closer to it than you think, however.

To find out, first check your printer’s user manual and see exactly what the minimum settings are. Next, open your printer’s Windows dialog box. Select File/Properties, then Paper. Are the settings higher than your printer’s minimums? If so, lower the settings to the minimums and you’ll be able to print closer to the edge.

If the settings are too low, raise them to the printer’s minimum.

The best way to add emphasis to a word or phrase in text is to:

A: Put it all capital letters.
B. Put it in italics.
C: Underline it.
D. Put it in boldface.

Despite the liberty with which advertising copy uses capital letters, underlining and bold type to grab the attention of readers, the best answer is “B”. In normal text, the long-standing, accepted typesetting practice is to emphasize words by placing them in italics. The other alternatives, being more visually arresting, tend to disrupt a smooth reading of the text, while italics conveys a sense of importance or stress on the words without jarring the reader’s eye. ■