Print Tool?

[01hanstu]

Hi, Hope you can help. We are currently trying to find a solution to our printing problem.

When the students send a document, and say for example the printer is our of paper the students will print it again before going to the printer, then when the printer has paper it spits out two copies of the students work, and its a problem as we are trying to save paper and encourage the use of digital copies and only hard for the SEN Pupils.

Is there a tool that, when the student prints the document again they get some form of message letting them know that they have that document in the print Que.

Many Thanks to you
Stuart
IT Technician

[OutToLunch]

Papercut NG can delete duplicate jobs from the print queue apparently - just using the free version here for logging only so maybe someone else can let you know how effective this is?

Using filters and restrictions

[enjay]

We use StopIt from Flo for print credits and disk quotas. This can be set so that duplicate print jobs are automatically deleted - you just specify the length of time before which the second copy can be printed.

We tried it out and fairly quickly turned it off again. Teachers often want to print pages 1 and 7 of a document (esp. reports), so would print "current page only" twice (I know other methods are possible, but this is what they did), and find the second one would get deleted. Also, it can sometimes take the students quite a while before hitting print the second time (esp. where paper jam delays are involved) meaning that the time limit was so long that legitimate reprints were getting blocked.

This was our experience, but your findings may vary...