When Jeremy Buhler joined our department, he pointed out one thing that was sorely missing in our office: a high resolution, color, duplexing printer.
We bought one, and while it posses all of the above adjectives, one thing we forgot to wish for was "reasonably fast".
The reason for obtaining said printer, especially the "duplexing" part, was to save paper. Printing double-sided also lightens one's load when traveling.
We soon came to realize that we needed something reasonably fast, but also something that could print double-sided; printing in olor was as gratifying as we had hoped.
Today, CTS installed our spiffy new printer with just the right properties. We will save paper as we duplex-print at a rate of some 40 pages per minute.
The real dilemma for our department is how to step up our paper-writing and publications activities to match the speed of our new printer. As usual, mathematics informs us of the solution.
We have 20 faculty, so if each of us can write a page every 30 seconds, we can keep the printer busy. An average paper for a conference is 10 pages in length. Thus, we each have to write a paper every 5 minutes. It will help if some of our papers are rejected, so that we can simply edit them and resubmit them elsewhere. Thankfully, program committees are all too obliging in that respect.
I suggest a software solution to your problem: use Adobe Pagemaker to layout your papers. In addition to providing a feature-rich and advanced means of layout, Adobe Pagemaker also produces some of the lowest-quality Postscript available. You can feel secure that the endless loops and crashes thereby generated will ensure your ability to write is not outstripped by the printer's ability to print. As a bonus, the printer will produce toner-efficient pages informing you that your print job, alas, is not to be.
Unless you have an HP. In which case it will spend 10 minutes pretending to print, and then pretend your job is done, while producing a most resource efficient 0 pages of output. The best of all worlds--save paper, toner, and power.
The department did spring for a Tektronix, yes?
Posted by: Joe at January 22, 2003 10:15 PM
Alas, no, it's merely an HP, so we don't expect problems of that kind.
Posted by: rkc at January 23, 2003 8:11 PM