Papercut printing duplex.

[Rob_D]

*Sorry if this is in the wrong place.

 

Hi Guys, I have an odd thing happening in papercut when I do duplex printing (from windows 10/ office 2013).

 

If I print a document with an even number of pages, then I'm charged for the number of sheets I use (number of pages halved so in a 6 page word document I'm charged for 3 pages), this kind of made sense on its own - maybe papercut is charging per piece of paper that I use rather than the number of pages in the document.

 

But If I print a document with an odd number of pages, the number of pages I'm charged for is the same as the number of pages in the document.

 

So a 6 page document costs the same as a 3 page one.

And yes I have double and triple checked that I'm not changing any other print settings. All I'm doing is adding extra (blank) pages.

 

I could rationalise either method of charging, but this switching isn't right.

 

We're using PaperCut MF 16.0 (Build 35130 2016-04-06)

 

Anyone else seen this or knows what's going on?

 

Thanks for the help guys.

 

Rob.

[TechMonkey]

Under Charging, for the printer you are sending it to, have you got anything odd in the Duplex charging boxes? If you aren't taking into account the paper, the cost should be the same for simplex and duplex. I wonder if someone has done something silly like halved the cost.

[Rob_D]

I've checked, and everything in the charging box is as expected. We've got a 20% discount for duplex set up, but that seems to be applying properly.

This only seems to happen in Office programs.

And it's not cost thats wrong. Papercut is showing the wrong page count for the documents. (The charging is fine based on the page count.)

[Narwhal]

can you post a screen shot of the charging for that printer (I am assuming they were both sen to the same printer)?

[Rob_D]

Sure,

 

I'm printing to a virtual (follow me) print queue. These are settings for the queue. I've checked and they are identical on all the follow me enabled printers.

 

Just to be clear, both example print jobs were set to duplex, and both printed back-to-back (as expected).

Edited September 23, 2016 by Rob_D

[Julian]

I do not know if this will help, but here is how my Papercut charges are set up.

[Narwhal]

I am struggling to see how your two jobs were charged at the rates shown in your settings. If each page is 10p as standard with a 75% discount for greyscale and a 20% discount for duplex a duplex six page job should cost 3p. however a 3 page job would be 2 pages with a 95% discount and one page with only a 75% discount so .5p + .5p + 2.5p = 3.5p for the job. so despite only using 2 pieces of paper and printing 3 pages the 3 page job would be more expensive. I think that is correct, I am sure others will let me know if I am wrong! We have our charging set up using standard charging type as per Julian.

[Rob_D]

I am struggling to see how your two jobs were charged at the rates shown in your settings. If each page is 10p as standard with a 75% discount for greyscale and a 20% discount for duplex a duplex six page job should cost 3p. however a 3 page job would be 2 pages with a 95% discount and one page with only a 75% discount so .5p + .5p + 2.5p = 3.5p for the job. so despite only using 2 pieces of paper and printing 3 pages the 3 page job would be more expensive. I think that is correct, I am sure others will let me know if I am wrong! We have our charging set up using standard charging type as per Julian.

 

You see that's what I thought. But what happens is, the two discounts are applied sequentially, so it's 10p-75% (2.5p) for mono, then any duplex pages have the extra 20% taken off that (2.5p -20%), which brings it down to 2p. So a three page document should be 2*duplex mono pages and 1*single sided mono pages, or 2p+2p+2.5P=6.5p

While a 6 page document should be 6*duplex mono pages or 2p*6=12p.

 

I don't know why we went with this over standard charging, it's not something I've had any input into.

Edited September 29, 2016 by Rob_D

[Narwhal]

That makes a lot more sense. So, no idea why it is charging the same for both. Do you have a support contract?

[Rob_D]

Yeah, We've got a case open with them, and they're investigating now. I'll update this if when we work out what's going on.