printing

[John West]

I am cross-posting this in hopes of finding an inexpensive solution to 
providing printing to our public access patrons.

Austin College is a small liberal arts college of 1,200 students.  We have 
a microcomputer classroom in our library open to students, faculty and 
staff.  All other patrons must use the computers we have provided outside 
of this facility - Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 PCs.  We provide access to 
the Internet through these machines which also have Fortres 101 to protect 
against general mischief.  In the past we have provided printing by 
permitting the downloading of files to the floppy drive and then having the 
person bring the diskette to our Circulation Desk.  From there we locate 
the file and print it out.

To do this, a patron must follow some published instructions which 
indicated how he/she was to use the Save As function to save the file.

I would prefer to:

1) have each person simply Print from the web browser, but we are concerned 
about wasteful printing and in controlling the print jobs themselves
2) if not 1) then have them Save As to a network available drive from which 
we can select whichever file we want to print (after establishing from our 
patron which file(s) to print

Unfortunately, I don't seem able to have a printer that will use the 
special Print to File as a shared printer over a network.  If that worked 
perhaps we could manipulate the print queue to our advantage, but I haven't 
been able to get that to work.  In sharing the printer, everything sent to 
it prints OK, but we have no real control over deciding which of the jobs 
in the print queue are to be printed.

In sharing a space on a hard drive for others to 'save as' to, and from 
there to have it printed, I've found that certain file types create 
problems (.cgi; .pl; .asp) not that they can't be worked around but simply 
having those files opened by Netscape hasn't worked well though changing 
the extension to .htm or .html allows them to be opened and printed (most 
of the .asp, .pl, and .cgi files seem to have others like them embedded so 
Netscape tried to open each instance individually - nope, don't want 
that).  Since they are saved files instead of printed files they have lost 
some information along the way.  If they had been Printed, all of the 
images would be there instead of rather ugly looking place holders.  I am 
anticipating statements like, "Well, it didn't look like that when I saved it?"

If anyone has an inexpensive way to manipulate a print queue, or advice on 
this other than the prior discussions on debit print cards, UniPrint, 
GoPrint, etc., please email me directly.

yrs,

John



John R. West             "always the beautiful
Assoc. College Librarian/ answer who asks a
Systems Administrator     more beautiful
Abell Library Center      question..."
Austin College              Edward Estlin Cummings
900 N. Grand Avenue       "If they can get you to
Sherman, TX  75090-4440   ask the wrong questions
phone: 903-813-2536       then they don't need to
fax: 903-813-2297         worry about the answers."
e-mail:jwest at austinc.edu     Thomas Pynchon