I'm sure most of us here at the Center have encountered this strange problem and know the reason why this occurs... but I'll post this to inform the new student assistants as it comes up quite frequently!
When a patron comes up to the desk and asks why their document won't print, although it is on the Print Release Station's queue, it can probably be assumed that it is a paper size issue. The document will be listed on the monitor, but it will not be selectable, therefore the user will not be prompted to swipe their card and print.
The issue is that the document is in a paper size that our printers do not support. For example, a student may have a Word Document in A4 paper size. To solve this, just go back to the computer they were on, go to page setup and switch from A4 to something supportable (US Letter). Send the document again by printing, and it will now be selectable at the Print Release Station.
For some reason, this only seems to occur on the Macs, and in my experience, it has always been in A4 size (the non-North American, metric system standard paper size). Has anyone seen a case where this has happened on a Windows, or if there was another problem causing the job to not be selectable?
Another issue that will make the document not print is if it is a "Read Only" document. I have only seen this happen with a Word Document. You can tell if it's a read only file if "(Read Only)" appears at the top of the Word window after the file name. Just save the file as a different name on the Desktop to get rid of the read only designation.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue can happen with PDFs. If a PDF is printed from a web browser it can either not print at all, or not print correctly (prints single sided rather than the selected double sided). I suggest to everyone to download the PDF to the computer and open it with Preview (MAC) or Adobe Reader (MAC/PC). I would do so for any file type actually. Printing from Google Docs for example can mess up formatting when printing.