Following the demise of Family Reading Publications- the main book distributor for our bookshop- earlier this year, I've been trying to put together our own in-house catalogue.
FRP used to put out a quality catalogue every couple of months, and at 30c a copy it was the most effective form of advertising available to us. I used to take them around to the various churches in town and the pastors would get them passed out to their members. Towards the end of last year people were coming in to the Bookshop with the catalogue in hand saying "I want that one!"
So, I put together the information, and Crystal who has an eye for graphic design put together this really nice catalogue- nothing like the old ones, just an A3 page printed both sides folded in half to make a 4 page A4 brochure.
She emailed me the file. But she had produced it on MS Publisher and nothing in the known world can read Publisher files.
After a bit of wrestling with her lap-top we got it saved as a pdf.
Then the printer decided that A3 was a bit beyond what we really wanted. "No problem" I thought, I'll just produce it on A4. It would still look good, be cheaper and possibly more effective.
Then I discovered that telling the pdf viewers that I have to print it to A4 just meant that they crop off the bits that don't fit on the smaller page- i.e. half of it.
Not to be beaten, I tried Open Office's pdf editor- it just choked trying to load it.
GIMP can handle pdf's I remembered. That looked complicated though as it wanted to open them as two separate images. How could I re-combine them to a single document?
So in the end I used GIMP to convert the pdf pages to two separate jpg images. Then I used Open Office to put them into a single document. It took a while to convince OO that I really did want to use the full page for the document as the margins were already contained in the graphics. Then I saved it as a pdf.
Printing the pdf would be a snack now. Oh no it wouldn't.
The size of the document, plus the fact that I wanted 300 copies of it was just too much memory for every application I could find.
So now I called upon the brilliance of linux. I wrote a simple program to print out the file 300 times. Thinking I had finally beaten the technology, I smugly sat back only to have the printer jam on every copy.
It was getting caught in the duplexer (that's the gizmo in the printer that effectively lets you print both sides of the paper). I took it out to Tim, and asked him to fix it. He cleaned the rollers but thought it wasn't going to do much. He was right. It appears that the rollers have worn out.
So it was back to the old-fashioned way. Print one side at a time.
Off we go again. Starting at 6 o'clock last night the printing was going brilliantly. Unfortunately by 10 o'clock we had only done 170 copies of one side. It was taking nearly two minutes a page!
Tim thought about it and said it should be doing 4 pages a minute. If we could send the document to the printer once and store it on the internal hard drive we can tell it from the panel on the printer to print multiple copes, and because it doesn't have to think about where to put the toner on each new page it will just spit them out.
It can't be done on the linux drivers but it can be done from a Windows computer. So I sent the file to his computer and he sent it back to the printer, telling it to save it.
I started off the print job and happily watching the papers spitting out at the promised rate of 4 pages per minute. Joy oh joy!
Then the dreaded orange light came on- out of cyan toner. D'oh.
We also have a warning about magenta toner and new drum required. It looks like the catalogues won't be going out this weekend.
The joy of technology! :)
I think printers were put into the world to teach us patience and self-control.
:)
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