Printing aaaaarrrrhghh

[jmak]

I'm trying to soothe some fraying tempers as "Printing isn't working. Fix it now. Don't make suggestions, just make it work". Which is really inspiring me [emoji2959], but that's a different topic.

 

Can I reject prints from specific applications? Or reject files over a certain size? Or restrict to a single page.

 

We have up to 80 students in a room with four HP LaserJet Printers. They are mostly printing graphs which are generated by either an oscilloscope or results entered in Excel. They have been told not to print from the oscilloscope as it takes 30 snapshots at 1 second intervals and prints a high definition image of each one, one per page. This is causing the printers to keel over. Especially as the students who do this are typically the same ones who then get impatient about the delay and then try each of the other printers and then we get the report that printing is broken for everyone - which essentially it is, but with the equipment we have, there's no solution that will just fire out all the pages instantly and not delay the next print job. They're supposed to take a screenshot and paste it into a Word document, giving a much smaller file size.

 

We are using Papercut Mobility Print. The clients are all Windows 10 laptops connected by wi-fi. Last week I was fairly convinced the bottleneck was the WiFi, as we were getting printing failed messages, but we've replaced the APs and upgraded the backhaul and that problem appears to be resolved, but (as I predicted) we've just shifted the bottleneck along.

 

Suggestions welcome....

[computer_expert]

You can deny print spooling over a certain size using the 'Restrict the maximum spool size of a print job' setting in NG & MF. Not sure if you can do it in the free Mobility print though.

[kevin_lane]

You could just deny the person?? Lol

[simpsonj]

Is it just Mobility Print, or do you have Papercut NG/MG on your print server?

[Koldov]

Is there any way to disable printing from the application?

[MartinT]

"Printing isn't working. Fix it now. Don't make suggestions, just make it work".

 

I'm afraid I would be questioning their rudeness in the face of your trying to fix the problem. No-one speaks to me like that and, if they did, I would be pushing back hard.

[andy_b]

If the oscilloscope is generating print jobs with a specific nomenclature you try blocking by document name:

 

Document Name

 

Filter jobs by their document title and/or file extension. Note: This option is not a "security feature" and can be easily bypassed by renaming documents. It's useful to stop accidental printing of known problem documents such as the company's large "accounts.xls" spreadsheet.

 

To use a Regex, enclose the pattern in forward slashes. For example: /.*\.pdf/

[Davit2005]

We had loads of issues in the last place, students were sending huge resolution images in documents to the printers and it would choke them up.

[psydii]

I think andyb has the best solution for you.

 

You could also make a spreadsheet that illustrates the problem points? image size, bit rate of wifi, wifi's inherent problem with co-channel interference, server processing time, network again, printer processing time, printer ram etc.

 

People who play with oscilloscopes understand graphs.

[jmak]

Is it just Mobility Print, or do you have Papercut NG/MG on your print server?

Just Mobility - apart from cost, I had the impression that users need to authenticate and these computers are intended for multiple users to access the oscilloscopes. I wouldn't have it that way, but that's not my call.

[jmak]

I'm afraid I would be questioning their rudeness in the face of your trying to fix the problem. No-one speaks to me like that and, if they did, I would be pushing back hard.

I have and that's being dealt with. We do need to resolve the issues with printing though...

[jmak]

We had loads of issues in the last place, students were sending huge resolution images in documents to the printers and it would choke them up.

I think it's this - the question is how to stop them doing it.