Printer Problems
I needed to reinstall one of my printers a few days ago. The reason I needed to do this was that I wanted to shift the printer from being connected to a specific computer to using a print server to connect it directly to the network. This would allow the printer to be available to print to from any of the computers without requiring a specific computer to be turned on in order to access it.
The actual install of the print server onto the network and enabling each of the computers to see the printer again after the move went through without any problem. Where the problem came was when actually trying to print to the printer from certain programs. For some stupid reason the printer insisted in installing itself with a configuration to use some obscure paper size that the printer itself doesn’t even have a paper tray for instead f configuring itself to work with the standard paper size that it does support. Every attempt to print to selected programs would just hang the printer since it knoew that it couldn’t print to that size.
This in itself would not be a problem if the option to change the paper size was easy to find in the settings (preferably during the install process so that it can be set correctly for all programs in the first place). The problem was that the paper size option was buried deep in the settings which made it hard to find plus the settings are separate for each login (as if different people can print to different sized paper from the same printer). Locating all these options in each login and changing them to the correct values has taken me quite a while and I am still not sure I have found all the places that need changing.
Why printer’s cant default their paper size to the standard sized paper that they actually support and instead insist on selecting a non-standard size that is used only in one or two countries I don’t know. Surely with the operating system being configured for a specific country when you first set it up it ought to select the appropriate paper size for that country at the same time as it sets all the other country specific options. Sure provide the option to change the paper size but why not default it to the proper value in the first place.
Tags: operating system, paper size, print server, printer
