Now people are beginning a wholesale move across to mobile devices, smartphones and tablets. Yet for some reason I’m still completely unable to phathom these devices still don’t seem to come with native printer support.

To make matters even more confusing, many modern printers have supported wireless connectivity now for several years, more than long enough to allow the mobile and tablet operating system manufacturers to pull their collective fingers out.

This constantly boggles and amazes me as there are all manner of things we want to do with our phones and tablets, from booking journeys to online shopping and email, where printing support would come in extremely handy. Yet, still nothing but stony silence from the major operating system manufacturers.

It doesn’t even strike me as technically difficult either. If you are connecting to a remote printer you will be doing so via wi-fi. The printer manufacturers would probably fall over backwards to add smartphone and tablet support to their driver-ranges, and it still doesn’t happen.

It’s not as if modern devices don’t have the storage and the processing power for these drivers. Many smartphones regularly come with at least 8Gb or 16Gb of storage and they’re now apperaring with dual-core processors.

So the great mystery continues. Why, unless we spend money on expensive third-party addons which may not even exist for your platform, are we being denied the one thing that was a cornerstone of the modern computing revolution? How is it that Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google don’t see printing as being either important or relevant to our daily lives?

It’s not often I write a rhetorical article such as this. There is, sadly, no answer to this question at all and no hope that we’ll get some any time soon. It’s not a subject that any of the major operating system companies ever mention, despite printer manufacturers no doubt chomping at the bit to get into new markets and modern phones such as Nokia’s N8 coming with USB ports.

So we’re left in a strange place where the whole computing market is moving slowly and inexorably towards new forms of mobile computing and, at ever-increasing speed, away from the home office, while at the same time needing to keep the home office around for the next time we want to print a booking confirmation or an email.

Personally I find this situation immensely frustrating;after all, how hard can it be for printer manufacturers to come together to develop a single universal driver that will do the basics of text and photos (which is all we really need) that can then be bundled by default with modern smartphone and tablet operating systems. Such a driver would connect to compatible printers via wi-fi and, before you can say paper jam, there would be your hard copy… well, you know what I mean.

I’m really hoping that this situation resolves itself before too long so please, please show this article to every influential person you can find. I’d imaging you’ll probably have to hand them a device where they can read it on the screen though :/

Govert’s Simple Imposition Tool is a free standalone software that can reformat pdf documents before printing. It is not only useful for users whose pdf readers cannot print multiple pages though, as it offers more than just that.

When you open the program for the first time, you notice a one-page layout where everything is configured. You load a pdf document at the top. The properties of the document are shown below, including the document’s size, pages and rotation.

Four formatting options and five optional settings are available under the Impose for section. You have the following formatting options:

• Booklet printing – Orders the pages automatically so that you get a booklet when you print and fold the printout. Optional foldmark can be added, which can be read by automatic folding machines.
• 2-up printing – Odd and even pages are printed side by side on one sheet of paper. Page Separation lines can be optionally added.
• Duplicate side-by-side – Print the same page twice on one sheet of paper. Cutmarks can be added to define where the document should be cut in half.
• 2x 1/2n – Places first half of multipage document side by side with second half. Duplex printing and cutmarks optional.

A click on the Action button launches a file save window where you can enter a name for the new pdf document. And that’s basically it.

If you compare the options to Adobe Reader, you notice that some are supported by Adobe’s product as well. You can use Adobe Reader to print multiple pages on one sheet and in booklet format. What’s not supported is the ability to print the same page multiple times on a sheet, and the option to place the first half of the document side by side with the second half.

The Simple Imposition Tool is available for Windows PCs. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. The program was tested under a 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Professional. It worked without flaws.

A better solution in many cases is to use Dropbox to send the documents to the computer that is connected to the printer.

All you need is a Dropbox connection on the device and the computer that is connected to the printer. It basically works by running a script on the computer with printer that will monitor one Dropbox folder whenever the script is running.

Documents that are copied into the folder will be automatically added to the print queue and printed so that it is possible to print while you are on the road or working with another computer.

Executing the eprint.vbs script creates the folder Printqueue in the Dropbox folder.

• Step 1: Make sure that you have Dropbox on the computer that is connected to the printer.
• Step 2: To send print jobs from your mobile device to the printer, you have two options.

  You can download a Dropbox app on your mobile phone — they have apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Nokia, webOS (Palm), and Android based phones.
  Alternatively, you can send files from your mobile phone to Dropbox using email. Just connect your Dropbox account with Habilis and they’ll give you a unique email address – any files or attachments sent to this address will automatically appear in your Dropbox folder.

• Step 3: Download this zip file* and double-click the eprint.vbs file (see the source code). The script will create a sub-folder inside your main Dropbox folder called PrintQueue where all the mobile print jobs will queue up and another sub-folder called logs where all the completed jobs will be archived.

  [*] VBS scripts are Windows-only but there are workarounds for Mac OS X and Linux as well.

• Step 4: You are now all set to print files from our mobile phone. Just send a test file from your mobile phone to that secret email address, or upload it through the Dropbox mobile app, and your printer will turn it into a hard copy almost instantly.

  The utility can also handle multiple files in one go and it should print almost all file formats for which you have an associated application on the computer. If you would like to shut down the eprint utility, launch Windows task manager and end the “wscript.exe” process from the list.

(via)

How do you handle print jobs on devices that have no direct printer connection?

“Additionally, a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 consumes more CPU resources when you print a document.”

An example of this behavior would be a 100% cpu usage for a long time in the Windows Task Manager when printing documents on computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Best option to find out if your system is affected by poor printing performance is to open the Windows Task Manager and monitor the cpu usage while printing.

According to Microsoft, the “issue occurs because of a performance regression in spooler behavior on single-processor systems that are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2″.

This means that only single-core cpu systems running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 may be affected by the performance issue.

A hotfix is available for users affected by the issue. A total of three hotfixes are offered, targeting 32-bit, 64-bit and ia64 systems. Each hotfix contains the fix for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Users need to make sure that they are affected by the issue before installing the hotfix on their system.

The hotfix is a temporary solution, and it is likely that Microsoft will release a patch in the near future to address the printing performance issue. (via Windows7news, Microsoft Releases Fix For Windows 7 Printing Issue)

Because many are still sceptical, I thought I should illustrate how easy it is to set up a networked printer in Fedora 13. Hopefully this process (as outlined here) will serve to change your mind on the difficulty of Linux and the state of Fedora. So, without further adieu, let’s set up a network printer in Fedora 13.

The printer in question

I am going to set up a Samsung ML-1710 laser printer attached to a print server (an Excito Bubba 2 device serves up the printers with the help of Samba) on a network and is used by multiple machines (both Linux and Mac OSes – sorry, no Windows here).

Prior to the latest releases, in order to get this printer working, the Splix drivers had to first be manually installed. This is no more – at least not manually).

Starting the process

Figure 1

To start the process of setting up a printer, click System > Administration > Printing to bring up the Printer administration tool (see Figure 1). From this window you need to click the Add button and select “Printer”. You will have to enter your root password to continue.  Depending upon the state of your firewall, this might open up a window informing you that changes must be made to your firewall to allow the detection of a network printer. Allow this to happen by clicking Adjust Firewall. You will then be asked for your root password once again.

Figure 2

The next window to appear is the New Printer window. Here you will expand the Network Printer selection (see Figure 2) and then select Find Network Printer. When you click that button you will need to enter the IP address of your printer server and then click the Find button. Once you have done that the tool will automatically add the necessary information for the printer location (see

Figure 3

Figure 3). Click the Verify button to make sure the printer information is correct. In my case I had to replace the host name with the IP address. I could have gotten around this by mapping the hostname to an IP address in the /etc/hosts file.

Once you have done this, click the Forward button and the drivers will automatically be detected and installed (if necessary). If your drivers must be installed, click the Install button (when prompted). The drivers will then be attached to the printer and you will be moved to another screen – printer description. The information in this window is all user-friendly, user-readable information. After you fill this out, click Apply, enter your root password, and click Print Test Page when prompted.

That’s it. You have successfully set up a networked printer in Linux. This process has come a long way from where it was just a few short years ago. And if you’re wondering why I chose setting up a network printer to show how user-friendly Fedora 13 has come, I did so because we all know how frustrating setting up a network printer can be. And since setting up a local printer is far easier, you can see that the addition of a printer to your Fedora 13 machine is now a process anyone can do.

The service works by pointing it to an url on the Internet. The website will be loaded by Print What You Like with controls to manage elements on the website in a left sidebar.

The mouse cursor will automatically highlight elements on the website. These elements can then be manipulated in the sidebar. It is for instance possible to remove elements from the website, change the text font and size, fit elements to the width of the page or resize elements.

Print What You Like offers an automatic option as well which works well on some websites but not on all. This option in theory removes all unnecessary elements from the website.

The service is also offering a bookmarklet that sends urls directly to it making the process more user friendly. Alternatives to Print What You like are The Printliminator bookmarklet, Print Friendly or Green Print.

Print management software programs like iPrint aid the organization and user in reducing the printing costs. The free application for the Windows operating system offers several smart ink saving techniques. This is achieved by installing iPrint as a virtual printer in Windows which acts as a proxy that is providing the print management features.

The iPrint interface is displayed whenever the virtual printer is selected to print a document in the operating system.

The print management software offers two options to lower the printing costs. The first option is to remove pages from the print job so that they are not printed when the processed document is send to the printer. The second option is to print more than one page on every sheet that gets printed. The user can change the print option from a single page per sheet that gets printed to two or four pages per sheet.

The number of saved pages is displayed in the footer of the application window. A click on the savings button displays a statistic that informs the user of the total number of pages that have been saved and the saved costs per page and the total savings.

IPrint can be helpful in lowering the printing costs. The only option that is missing is to change the amount of printer ink that is applied to each printout so that ink is saved as well. The software can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. (via JKWebtalks)

The concept of the RiTi printer goes further than that. It does not require a power source for the actual printing process which is also something that traditional printers require. The printout is created by moving the ink case left and right manually. This obviously means that this method is not suited for printing out many papers at once.

Users who work regularly with printers might not be inclined to give that new printer concept a try as it opens a can of questions and possible problems:

• It is not practicable to print many documents
• The quality of the printout differs
• Only black and white printouts
• Coffee or tea dregs required to print

The RiTi printer could on the other hand prove to be the printer of choice for environmentally interested users who do occasional printouts.

source Greener Gadgets

DVD Print is a small program for the Windows operating system. It is a portable software program that will ask for a registration code upon start. This can be skipped however and there are no information on the website or in the application about the registration process (and what could happen if the registration is skipped continuously).

CD and DVD covers can be loaded in the application. A built in search can be used to find appropriate covers. The covers are however not downloaded directly in the software as they redirect the user to the website the cover was found on. It is then the user’s task to download the cover and import it into the DVD printing application.

Various cover presets are available ranging from DVD box covers over audio CD front inserts to Playstation 1 double sleeves. There is also the option to create a new preset in case the existing ones are not suitable for the media.

There is also the option to add image effects to the cover which include the creation of a double-feature cover (for two movies on one DVD), music track overlays or flipping and rotating images around. DVD Print is a portable application that can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

Print Friendly is a web based service that is available on their main website, as a bookmarklet and for website owners as a script to put on their websites directly. Print Friendly will basically remove certain elements like advertisement by default from the website. By doing this it reduces the printer ink needed to print the website. More important than that is probably the option to remove additional elements before sending the rest of the document to the printer.

This makes it possible to remove additional unwanted elements such as tags or images from the document before printing it. Print Friendly offers an option to automatically remove all images from the document to make things easier if a document contains many of them. It also features an undo function in case the user wants to go back to a previous state.

The optimized document can then be printed or turned into a pdf at the Print Friendly website. The bookmarklet makes it easier to use the service while surfing the Internet as it will automatically load the active website in the Print Friendly website.

Print Friendly might come handy in situations where other tools or extensions that can remove elements from websites before printing are not available.

The CUPS web administration tool is easy to work with and can be used on any distribution that has CUPS installed. In this article you will see how simple it is to add a printer to a Linux system via the CUPS web interface.

Getting and installing

Although CUPS is usually installed on most distibutions, it might be best to show how this printing system is installed. The easiest method is to open up the Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “cups” (no quotes), select the results, and apply the changes. If you prefer the command line you can do something like this (from terminal window):

yum install cups

NOTE: You must have root privileges for the above.

sudo apt-get install cups

After the installation is complete, the cups daemon should start itself. If you find it has not you can start it with one of the following commands:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start

NOTE: The above will require root privileges.

sudo /etc/init.d/cups start

Getting to and using the web interface

You might think you need a web server installed for this. You don’t. The CUPS system has its own server that will serve up the web interface, so you do not have to install Apache. To get to this interface open up your browser and enter:

http://localhost:631

Figure 1

The first page you will see will be that shown in Figure 1. From this page you can take care of all of your printer needs. You can manage print jobs, manage printers, create and manage printer classes, and read CUPS documentation.

In order to add a printer click on the Administration tab  and then click the Add Printer button (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Once you click on the Add Printer button you will walk through a printer setup wizard. Most of the steps in this wizard should be fairly straight forward. Below is the list of the information you will need to supply for adding your printer:

Name: Name your printer (no spaces, “/”, or “#” characters).

Location: Human readable location for the printer.

Description: Human readable description of your printer.

Device: How the printer interfaces with your machine. This could be LPT, SCSI, AppSocket, Samba, Internet Printing Protocol, etc. If your printer is attached locally you will most likely see it in this listing.

Device URI: If you are using IPP you will need to supply this address which will look something like ipp://IP_ADDRESS_TO_PRINTER_SERVER/SPOOL

Where IP_ADDRESS_TO_PRINTER is the actual IP address for your printer server and SPOOL is the name of the spool your printer is attached to.

Make: The brand of your printer.

Model: The model of your printer.

During the last step (selecting the Model of your printer) you will click the button “Add Printer” at which point you will have to supply the username and password of the user who is allowed to make these changes. This will either be the root user or a your standard user (if using sudo).

Figure 3

Once the printer is added you will see it listed in the Printers tab. The listing of each printer (see Figure 3) will allow you take a number of actions on a printer including:

• Print test page
• Stop printer
• Reject jobs
• Move all jobs
• Cancel all jobs
• Unpublish printer
• Modify printer
• Set printer options
• Delete printer
• Set as default
• Set allowed users

Final thoughts

Setting up a printer in Linux is actually quite simple. And having a standardized interface means setting up a printer can be the same no matter what distribution you are using.

If you want to print a webpage you are either stuck to selecting a piece of text, or printing the whole page as is. If you are lucky there’s a printable version, but this removes everything except the text, so again, not too flexible. Print What You Like let’s you enter a website which it renders for you, enabling you to remove any elements you don’t need.

The flexibility here is really great, you can literally add or remove any element whatsoever. You can select paragraphs and resize them horizontally and vertically, all content will get pushed along as it should. You can even change the text size and the text font.

You can remove all images and backgrounds with one click if that’s all you need, but tweaking is up to you, you can delete as much or as little as you want. There is also an option to add more pages, taking text or images from multiple sources, you could create a little web-book of your favorite posts of the week.

The features are really great and printing what you need has never been made so easy. Just a tiny addition, the ability to move items on page would have been nice. This is a great idea and it is executed very well, I recommend this to anyone with printing needs, in the end you might spend less ink on it, saving you money and helping the environment.

A click on the Print Now button will send the print job to the local printer so that the ID card photo can be printed the selected amount of times on the page.

There is not anything special about this printing software and the same effect could be initiated by almost any software that can display images and provide printing possibilities. The main advantage of using ID card photo printing software is the ease of use. It does not take longer than a few seconds to start the print job whereas it usually takes longer to do the same in non-specialized software programs.

ID Card Photo is compatible with most versions and editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website and requires that at least one printer is installed on the computer system.

Printing web pages can be quite a headache sometimes. More often than not, half the page is taken up by advertisements, menu bars, empty space, and other information that a user just doesn’t want. You pretty much wind up wasting printer ink on a bunch of junk information.

One way to make printing more relevant to a web page is to use PrintWhatYouLike. The website helps you format web pages so that you can print exactly what you need. Not only does it make printing more efficient and cheap (because you don’t waste ink on junk info) but also it ensures you do your bit for the environment.

Using PrintWhatYouLike is extremely easy. Enter the url of the page you want to print in the box on the website. The web page then shows up with a formatting bar on the left-hand side. The bar has plenty of features, to optimize your printing experience.

The PrintWhatYouLike formatting bar has options that allow you to set the printing area for your web page. Then you can remove selected areas of the page, certain images, or even the page background. Finally, you can change the size of the text and the font itself, which is great for all those pages with hard-to-read text. As a bonus feature, you can combine more than one page while printing.

I tried out PrintWhatYouLike and came away impressed. It’s fast, easy to use and serves the purpose it advertises. Plus, it’s web-based so there’s no need to install an additional application. If you regularly print web pages, I recommend using the PrintWhatYouLike bookmarklet.

What do you think of this website? In your opinion, what’s the most efficient way to print a web page without unnecessary elements? Do you know of other similar sites? Let me know in the comments.

HP Smart Web Printing (thanks Archer for the tip) adds a button to Internet Explorer and Firefox after installation. This button was immediately accessible in Internet Explorer. It is added to the Navigation Toolbar in Firefox which is disabled on my system by default. I had to enable the toolbar and drag and drop the button to another toolbar in Firefox to be able to access it.

Clips can be selected by pressing the HP Smart Select button and the sidebar that displays all created clips can be opened with the shortcut SHIFT CTRL K or by selecting the menu of the button.

The HP Smart Web Printing application integrates itself nicely into both browsers and provides a very interesting feature to be able to print exactly the area of the screen that should be printed. Definitely a must have for users who print regularly.