The Computer Center maintains a Xerox Phaser 7750 GX model color laser printer for use by department members. This printer is located in the copier room of the department office, 366b.

Use of this printer is not free. Please use this on-line form to register a budget to be charged for your consumption. You can go ahead and print without registering, but you will be contacted later with a bill. Please note: The accounting software can only deal with one budget per user. There is no way for the software to differentiate for a given user between many different budgets.

The features of this PostScript version 3 printer include 512 Mbytes of memory, duplex capability, output up to tabloid size (11" x 17"), and a resolution of up to 1200 dots per inch. Four paper trays allow us to keep plain letter-sized paper, plain legal-sized paper, transparency and tabloid media loaded at all times.

• Accounting Rules
• General Color Printing Background
• Command-Line Options for UNIX users
• Information for Macintosh users
• Information for Windows PC users
• Tips
• Links to Other Sources of Information

Accounting Rules

To send print jobs to the Phaser 7750, you must (currently) send the print job to the dept7750 printer from eta.pha.jhu.edu (or a Computer Center-managed Solaris computer). We will try to open up access to the printer to other clusters and operating systems as we have time to test and verify their functionality.

General Color Printing Background

A very important thing to keep in mind is that some of these option choices are embedded in the file when you create it but that others are specified at the time of printing. Some embedded choices can have the same effect as the print job dispatch parameters. For example, if you set the paper size in your software program to be tabloid, the resulting PostScript file *should* include that information, and the printer *should* select tabloid paper automatically. Note that the results of specifying conflicting options within the file and in the print job parameters may be unexpected.

For maximum control, you should install a Xerox Phaser 7750-specific printer driver on your Mac or PC in order to embed printer-specific selections correctly. For example, you may not be able to specify tabloid- sized paper without such a driver. See the Mac and PC sections below for more information.

The safest thing to do overall is to pay close attention to the choices available in your software program when configuring and saving the file, then specify as much as you can when you actually send the job. In other words, over-specify to raise the odds that it comes out in the form you desire.

Some examples of embedded information:

• The document's orientation setting (either portrait or landscape).
• The document's page size setting (such as letter, legal or tabloid).
• An image that you chose to save from your software at a low resolution (such as 72dpi (dots per inch)). This will probably look WORSE when printed at a high resolution (like 1200dpi) than at a lower one (like 600dpi). You might also want to specify Image Smoothing when sending such an image (see below).
• The number of colors your software uses in manipulating, saving and printing an image. If it uses 8 bits to specify color information, then the most colors it can describe is 256. Such an image may look worse than a 24-bit image (which can have millions of colors).

Some examples of options chosen when sending the print job (see the UNIX tips section below for the command-line options to use):

• PAPER SOURCE/MEDIA TYPE
  The printer is configured to auto-select the right media tray. In practice, this does not always work as expected. That is one of the main reasons you are advised (above) to OVER-SPECIFY. To get tabloid or transparency media, specify that instead of the tray number.

  Tray four (plain letter-sized paper) is the default.

  Tabloid paper is 11 inches tall by 17 inches wide. This printer has a duplexer.

  Tray	Paper Type	Cost	Default?
  One (Multi-Purpose)	Unknown
  Two	Letter Transparency	$1.00
  Three	Tabloid	$1.00
  Four	Letter paper (plain)	$0.25	Default
  Five	Legal paper (plain)	$0.25

• SPECIAL PAPER TYPES
  The printer has a Multipurpose input tray (tray one). This can be used to feed paper types not found in one of the other trays, such as letterhead, coated paper (i.e. glossy paper), heavier stock, or A4 paper.

  You CAN print on heavier stock if you wish. Please consult the printer Reference Guide for the acceptable types of paper.

  Please DO NOT print on any other special paper types such as adhesive labels. We want to avoid possible damage to an expensive public resource by labels or glue sticking to the internal rollers. Also, it is difficult to control who is printing when, so your special papers may very well wind up being used by someone else who sends a job before you are ready.

  To use the Multipurpose tray:

  • Place the blank media in the tray (in the correct orientation).
  • Wait for the printer console to notice the new paper. It will ask you to set the Media Size and then the Media Type using the console buttons. Do so.
  • Then send your print job, specifying Multipurpose tray as the input tray.

  Note: You will be charged the higher price even if you use your own transparency or tabloid paper via the Multipurpose tray, as the accounting system cannot differentiate between input trays, only the type of paper used. This is okay because we want to use only Xerox-supplied transparency media to prevent damage to the printer.

• PRINT QUALITY
  Set the resolution (DPI = Dots Per Inch) and print speed (PPM = Pages Per Minute) through one of these selections.
  

  Mode	Resolution	Uses	Default?
  Standard	600x600 DPI	For the quickest color prints; Best for transparencies
  Enhanced	1200x600 DPI	For high-resolution color printing	Default
  Photo	1200x1200 DPI	For high-resolution color printing with the smoothest color transitions

• COLOR CORRECTION
  Select the color correction process suited to your needs:

  Mode	Uses/Comments	Default?
  Automatic	For general office printing. Optimizes the color for different types of elements on each page (text, photos and graphics)	Default
  sRGB Display	Printed colors simulate those displayed on a computer monitor
  sRGB Vivid Color	Produces more saturated images than sRGB Display
  None	Turns off all color correction processing in the printer
  (Multiple) Printing press	Colors simulate various printing press standards See manual on printer for the different types.

• IMAGE SMOOTHING
  This option blends adjacent colors in low-resolution (less than 150dpi) documents for smoother color transitions. For example, use Image Smoothing to improve the appearance of an image downloaded from a web site (many are typically saved in low resolution format so they download quickly). It is not recommended for 300dpi or higher images.

Command-Line Options for UNIX users

The printer defaults are to print on plain letter-sized paper, single- sided, in Enhanced quality, with Automatic color correction.

Print jobs destined for dept7750 are ultimately feed into some Xerox-provided programs (which are customized for our specific printer model). So most of the lp options you will want to use are unique to this printer. The main ones are listed below. You can see the entire list by printing a special job with this command:
lp -d dept7750 -o Options /etc/motd

The printer can also be called color instead of dept7750. You can cancel a job (if you move quickly enough) with the UNIX cancel command. If it has already been processed by eta and fed to the printer, your only recourse is to press the cancel button on the printer console (it is the bottom right hand one).

LP OPTIONS

When specifying multiple options, each one must be prefaced with a -o. You may put a space between the -o and the option. For example,
lp -d dept7750 -o photo -o NoDuplex filename1 filename2

Capitalization matters for these options!!

Information for Macintosh users

To print a file,

• choose Print in your chosen application
• select Output Options from the drop-down menu. Click on the checkbox Save as File and choose PostScript as the output type.
• Select any other desired options from the drop-down menu choices, especially the one marked Printer Features.
• Select the Save... button and choose a short and simple file name, which does not contain spaces or special characters.
• You need to transfer your PostScript files to eta first using an FTP (e.g. Fetch or Anarchy) or an SCP (e.g. NiftyTelnet) program. It would be wise to make the file name short and simple as UNIX commands are much harder to use with files that have spaces or special characters in their names. Because PostScript files are plain text, you *should* be able to make the FTP transfer in any mode (as opposed to having to use binary mode).
• Then you need to login to eta using an SSH program (e.g. NiftyTelnet).
• Use the UNIX command-line options as described above.
• Delete or compress the PostScript file after it has successfully printed with the UNIX rm or compress commands.
• Log off of eta.

Information for Windows PC users

• You need to transfer your files to eta first using an FTP or an SCP program. It would be wise to make the file name short and simple as UNIX commands are much harder to use with files that have spaces or special characters in their names.
• Then you need to login to eta using an SSH program (such as Putty)
• Use the UNIX command-line options as described above.
• Delete or compress the PostScript file after it has successfully printed with the UNIX rm or compress commands.
• Log off of eta.

Tips

• Print just one page when printing a new type of image or using a new type of software. Check the output before sending many pages to the printer.
• To cancel a job that has started printing, press the Exit button on the printer console. You may not cancel every page of the job, but you will reduce the page count if you are fast enough. This printer has so much memory that it can accept the print job from eta very quickly. When that happens, you lose the ability to cancel the print job from eta and must rely on the front panel approach.
• dept7750 is a PostScript printer. You cannot send plain text to it. You must convert plain text to PostScript with gnuenscript or some other program.
• Specify that your output should be of the latest version of PostScript. The language has gone through several revisions. The newest version is version 3.
• When printing on card stock in this printer, because that paper is thicker than plain paper and does not bend easily enough to feed from the normal paper trays, you should
  • put the blank copies in the manual feed tray on the right side of the printer, face up,
  • the printer will ask you, on its console, what size of paper it is (answer letter) and what type of paper it is (card stock),
  • then select that tray on your computer as the paper input tray.
  • I found that the manual feed tray needs to be fairly full (over 50%) for it to feed correctly.
• If the output does not match your expectations no matter which options you select, consider whether you are using the latest version of the software to create the PostScript file. The translation of your document into PostScript is one of those things which is often flawed in early versions of any brand of software.
• Delete or compress your PostScript files when you are not using them. Color PostScript files tend to be large. But they are composed of ASCII text instead of binary data, so if you must keep them around, compress them. Plain text compresses very well, saving 50% or more of disk space.
• Consider using acid-free paper for important images that you want to last a long time. You cannot control how the toner may fade, but you can prevent the pages from yellowing.

Links to Other Sources of Information

• Register your budget code -- Required to be able to use the printer!
• The printer itself - Check for status
• Xerox Color Printing -- their main color printing home page
• Xerox User Manuals -- on-line troubleshooting and other documentation