Printing in the Mac Labs PSFA 310 and 318
Two-step Troubleshooting Summary:
1 - Make sure the computer can find the printer it's trying to print to.
2 - Make sure PrintMonitor doesn't have a stopped queue.
Do not simply assume that you can tell an application to print, and the output will be printed on a printer in the room. It usually should, but these computers can be pointed at printers all across campus. If the previous person was printing to a printer in the police office, that's where any output you print will go, until you set the computer back to a printer in the room.
When you tell an application to print, the dialog box that opens is not just a meaningless formality where you have to click again to print. It allows you to save time and money (and perhaps have less ink smearing) by choosing to print in EconoFast mode, and it tells you the name of the printer it intends to try to print to. Please get into the habit of checking what printer you are printing to before printing.
1 - Selecting a printer with Chooser
Chooser is a tool for seeing what printer a computer is set to use, and for changing this setting. Select Chooser in the Apple menu, and a rectangular window will open. There should be a window on the left side with icons representing different types of printers, and if the computer can see the campus zones over the network (which it normally should), the lower side of the left half will be a scrollable list of campus zones. A window on the right lists available printers of the selected type in the current zone. There are also buttons for turning AppleTalk off and on - it has to be on to use these AppleTalk printers.
For rooms PSFA 310 and PSFA 318, the zone should be JOURNALISM and the printer icon should be DW 600 Series (AT). Select both of these, and a note should appear briefly saying the computer is building a list of the printers, then a list should appear in the window on the right.
There are 3 printers in room 310 and 4 in 318. The room number is part of the printer name. Select a printer in your room, and click the close box on the left end of the top border of the Chooser window. Your computer has now been set to use that printer.
If not all the printers in the room are visible in the Chooser window it is usually necessary to turn any printers that don't show off, then on again, and build the printer list again (the quickest way to tell it to rebuild is by selecting a different type of printer, and then selecting DW 600 Series (AT) again). Sometimes it is necessary to do this 6 or 8 times for a given printer. For this reason, it would be best to get all printers showing early in the day, and not turn them off again until after the last class of the day.
2 - Getting a print queue moving in PrintMonitor
The system allows setting up a print queue, so that a number of people can use a printer at once. The main problem associated with this is that once the print queue is stopped, you can not print again until action has been taken to get the queue moving again. Sending jobs to the printer after they didn't print the first time will add more copies of the same print job to the end of the queue, making a bigger logjam.
Multitasking on the Mac puts any running programs into a list visible by clicking and holding on the icon at the upper right corner of the display.
If there are print jobs stopped in queue, one of these running programs should be the HP PrintMonitor. Select this from that menu, and a window should open showing a list of queued print jobs (and also offering options like cancel, or if one or more in the waiting list is selected, remove from list).
At this time there should be only a file menu showing at the top of the screen, and one of the options in this menu will let you resume printing (start the queue) if it is stopped (it switches between starting and stopping the queue).
Having a print queue at all depends upon having background printing enabled (this is set by a pair of buttons available after you select the DW 600 Series (AT) driver in Chooser). It requires less understanding on the part of the user if background printing is turned off. Then, the first one who accesses a printer will get it, and anyone else will have to try sending their job again after that first job is over. There'll never be a stopped queue, but it takes a bit more persistence to get everybody's jobs printed. If background printing is turned on, people have to understand the print queue, or else a blockage can lead to multiple copies of each job stacked up in queue for each printer, and no queues moving.
PrintMonitor runs in the computer, not in the printer. A stopped queue on one computer will prevent that computer from printing to that printer until it is started; it may or may not interfere with printing from other computers.
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