Printer Types
A laser printer provides high-quality output on standard A4 paper, but is expensive to utilise. For this reason, each student is given a nominal print quota and is able to purchase extra print quota via the School's Print Kiosks. See School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering policy on Student Photocopying and Printing (St. Lucia) for more information.Dot matrix printers provide a lower quality output on fanfold 275mm x 375mm paper and will only print plain text documents. However these printers have no quota.
Printing from Windows
Usually when you log into a lab machine the nearest printer will be automatically selected as the default, however you can select which printer to use when printing from inside most programs, usually via the File menu, then options Printer Setup or Print. The exact method varies dependent on the application in use. When you request printing of a document, your request is sent to a queue which will print your document on a first come, first served basis. It will take upwards of 30 seconds from when you send your print job to when the first page begins processing by the printer, the exact time being dependent on factors such as complexity of your document, printer warm-up time and network utilisation.Printing from UNIX
The lpr command is used to print jobs from UNIX and the lpq command is used to check printer queues. Both commands use the "-P" option when specifying a printer. The printer names are based on the type of printer it is (in most cases "lp" for laser printer or "dm" for dot matrix), followed by a building identifier ("A" for Axon, "G" for G.P.South or "H" for Hawken) and lastly the room number. So to print to the laser printer in room 116 G.P.South building we get"lpr -PlpG116 filename" and to print to the dot matrix in room 121 G.P.South we get "lpr -PdmG121 filename".Banner Pages
Printed pages are preceded by a Banner Page which identifies the owner of the print job. It also includes details such as the owner of the print job, name of the print job, number of pages expected, number of pages remaining in your quota, etc. The banner page is not counted as one of the pages of output, and it does not subtract from your print quota.Print Accounting Information
There are two options which students can use to access information about their print accounts.(1) The "show_page" program on the Student UNIX servers:
s123456@studentunix:~$ show_page
login s123456:
* has 10 pages of School-supported allocation,
* has used 5 of these School-supported pages,
* has purchased 50 pages ($5.50),
* has used none of these purchased pages,
* has 50 purchased pages remaining ($5.50),
* a total of 55 output pages remain.
(2) The ITEE Student Printing History accessable via the link on this page under "ON THIS SITE".
This page shows the same information as "show_page" as well as showing your printing transaction history.
Authentication is required using your ITEE login and password.