Most PC and Mac Computing Laboratories contain an A4 B+W laser printer. Some come with duplex ability, but most do not. There is also an A3/A4 B+W/Colour laser printer available on Level 1 of the GP South building (it also has a scanner, the use of which is free.) Printing to any of these devices can only be performed after logging into the network.
Printer Types
A laser printer provides high-quality B+W or Colour output on standard A4/A3 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 online with a Credit Card via PayPal, or with cash 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.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), followed by a building identifier ("AX" for Axon, "GS" for G.P.South or "HS" for Hawken South, "HC" for Hawken Centeral) and lastly the room number. So to print to the laser printer in room 116 G.P.South building we get "lpr -PlpGS116 filename".
Banner Pages
We no longer print banner pages on any print jobs. It is your responsibility to ensure you promptly pick up your print job after printing, and no one else's.
Print Accounting Information
Your current balance, complete job and transaction history, cost for printing to various printers, and options for adding more print credit is available from http://print.labs.eait.uq.edu.au/ - you may be required to authenticate with your standard UQ username and password. There is also a client which should be available when you are logged into a computer which will display your current balance, as well as providing feedback on the amount deducted when you print something, or other printing related system messages.Please note that the old print history webpage and the unix show_page utility
are now both deprecated and will show misleading information if accessed.