UW Waterloo Polaris PC Network, User's Guide: Printing

Printing

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Overview

There are numerous printers available from Waterloo Polaris accounts. For a list of network printers, see J:\etc\printers.pol. Currently, however, each faculty uses a separate accounting system to maintain printing funds, so not all users can print to all printers. Many printers are available in the public labs in each faculty (see Finding and Booking Terminals) in the Essential Information. Check your local consulting office for additional printers which may be available in your faculty.

Cash Printing in the IST-CHIP

If you don't want to set up a laser printing account, you can still print on the colour or laser printers in the IST-CHIP (Computer Help and Information Place), MC-1052. A Waterloo Polaris station is available in the CHIP that allows access to the CHIP printers. Or, you can print to the CHIP printers from any Waterloo Polaris workstation by loading the print queues colour@vega or hp4_chip@vega. Pay cash for your output at the General Services desk.

Adding Money for Printing

All laser printing must be paid for, the usual cost being 8 cents per page. Each faculty maintains a separate accounting system for printing. However, the method of creating or adding to a printing account balance is the same almost everywhere:
  1. Add at least $5.00 for "flexible" money to your Watcard (student card). This can be done at any Food Services outlet on campus, at the Turnkey Desk in the Student Life Centre (24 hrs./day), or at any other business which accepts the Watcard for payment (such as Graphics Services Copy Centres). N.B. Food plan money is restricted to food plans; flex money can be used for other services.
  2. Create or add money to your laser printing account by using the Watcard swipe station in your faculty. Swipe stations are available 24 hours per day. (N.B. To print on printers outside of your home faculty, you can maintain a laser printing account in more than one faculty). Locations of the swipe stations are given in the table below.
Watcard Swipe Station Locations
FacultyLocation
Applied Health SciencesBMH 2116A
ArtsPAS 1080
EngineeringHallway outside E2-1308A
ScienceChem. Stores ESC-109, outside ESC 254F, OPT-306
IST CAS accountsIST-CHIP, outside MC-1052

N.B. Users with accounts in the IST Twinkle Labs (MC-2060 & 2061) need to pay for printing via a Computer Accounting System (CAS) account in the IST-CHIP (MC-1052).

Checking Your Laser Account Balance and Closing a Printing Account

Your printing money account will remain until you graduate or otherwise permanently leave UW, so it is not necessary to close your account before then. Account holders in all faculties except Math may check their account balances or close their accounts via a Web form. Math students should check the supplemental information provided by the Math faculty.

Any remaining funds will be returned to your Watcard on the following Friday, or on the following business day during the last month of an academic term. An administrative fee of 5% is charged by the Watcard office for a transfer of laser money back to your Watcard. If your laser-printing account is not used in more than one year, it will be deleted, along with any cash remaining on that account.

To close an IST CAS account, you must go in person to the CHIP, MC-1052. N.B. Once your printing money is transferred back to your Watcard, it is "flexible" money which can be spent on any cash purchases which can be made with the Watcard. If you want to obtain a cash refund of your Watcard balance a fee is levied and a cheque for your balance is mailed to you via cheque. See Watcard information on the Web.

Selecting a Printer

Printers closest to you and/or preselected by you are automatically installed in Windows95 when you log on to your Waterloo Polaris account. You can select from the installed printers when you print from any Windows95 application.

The Configure Waterloo Polaris application allows you to view or change the installed printers for this log-in session only. Note that the printer assigned in the last position (alternate printer) is the one which becomes the default printer in Windows. If you want to set specific printers to be available every time you log on, you can create a file called privexec.bat on your N drive and put a route command in it; e.g.
route prn laser@gaff lpt3 laser@wheel lpt2 colour@office lpt1 default@gaff
where the printer assigned to the prn port is the Windows default printer.

Local printers (attached directly to your Waterloo Polaris station) can also be installed using the Add Printer utility under Start / Settings / Printers.

The Waterloo Polaris Print Queues

When you print from an application to one of the Waterloo Polaris printers, a dialog box will appear asking if you want to print now, or later, or discard the print job.

You may want to send all of your print jobs to the printer at the same time to keep them all together and possibly save some money by eliminating separator pages. If you select Print Later in the Waterloo Polaris print dialog box, all of your print jobs are held in the queue until you select Print Now on your final print job. If you have been queuing up print jobs for later and you can discard any of the queued jobs by selecting them and clicking the Discard button.

There is a check box in the Waterloo Polaris print dialog box which allows you to always send each job directly to the printer if you prefer not to queue multiple jobs.

Checking the Status of a Print Queue

You can check the status of a print queue by using the command whoson queue@server-name in a DOS shell (Start/Programs/MS-DOS Prompt), where server-name is the name of the server the printer is attached to.

Deleting Jobs from a Print Queue

Once you have selected Print Now from the Waterloo Polaris print dialog box, you can still withdraw the print jobs. You can abort all queued print jobs sent to a particular print queue by typing print queue-name@server-name /npurge in a DOS shell (Start/Programs/MS-DOS Prompt), as long as they are not being actively processed by the printer.

Changing the Default Waterloo Polaris Printers

If you want to print to a printer other than the automatically loaded ones, run Configure Waterloo Polaris and make your changes there. These changes will only last for your current log-in session. Also note that open applications may not "see" the printer changes until they are closed and restarted.

To configure Windows95 to load printers other than the default ones each time you log in, create a file called privexec.bat in the root directory of your N drive and place the appropriate route command in it. Commands in this batch file are run each time you log on.
e.g. route prn laser@gaff lpt1 default@gaff lpt2 colour@office lpt3 laser@wheel
links the network ports prn, lpt1, lpt2, and lpt3 to the specified print queues. The the print queue linked to the prn network port specifies the default printer in Windows95 applications.

Accessing Other Printers on Campus

It is possible under Windows95 to print to printers accessible from Unix or NT servers you may have an account on. The Printers utility available under Start / Settings / Printers allows you to add such printers. Choose Add Printer and select "network printer". Using the Wizard, provide the network print queue in the form "\\host\queue_name", and select the correct driver for the printer.

Printing Text-Only Files

Some faculties have inexpensive or free printing for text-only (ASCII text) documents. In Engineering, students are assigned 60 pages of free "draft" printing on the text mode of the Waterloo Polaris printers. (When the free draft quota is used up, draft printing remains available at a lesser cost than laser printing.) In some other faculties, there are free dot-matrix printers available.

Printing text-only files from Windows95 just requires selection of the "default@server-name" printer, if available, from the Print dialog box in your Windows95 application. Note that some applications such as Microsoft Word do not print correctly through the text-only print driver. Alternately, you can save the file as "text only" from your Windows95 application, then print from disk in a DOS shell as outlined in the next section.

Printing Files from Disk

To print files from disk you need to open a DOS shell (Start / Programs / MS-DOS Prompt) and type the command:
print myfile.txt default@server_name or print myfile2.ps laser@server_name, where for the first instance a text file is being sent to the text mode of the printer named "server_name", and in the second instance a PostScript file is being printed to the same printer. You will get mail reguarding the success or failure of your print job.

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