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Trouble-free printing is just a click away [Mercury, The (South Africa)](Mercury, The (South Africa) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) PRINTING is often an expensive and wasteful process. I can't tell you how many pages I've wasted over the years when printing |e-mails or information from the internet - often there's a page at the end with just two lines of text I didn't need to print, or an expensive full-colour copy of an irritating advert. Here are some solutions I've tried to cut down on the waste: PDFs: Often, there's no need to print something at all. If you distribute something as "electronic paper" in PDF format and e-mail it instead of posting or faxing it, why bother? Anything you can print can be made into a PDF, and if you receive a PDF form to fill in or sign - Adobe's free Reader utility from www.get.adobe.com/reader/ makes this easy. Instructions to help you add a signature are at www.tinyurl.com/arsign01 and you can review Reader's new editing and commenting tools at www.tinyurl.com/artopten. Adobe's own Acrobat PDF writer software has long been the choice of businesses, due to its advanced security and collaboration features. If, however, you just need the ability to create PDF files from other documents, try PrimoPDF at www.primopdf.com. Click "Download Free" under the "Try Primo" section on the left - don't confuse it with the Nitro PDF trial on the right. Run the download to install PrimoPDF. When you want to create a PDF file, simply "print" the document by clicking File > Print in your application, but select the PrimoPDF "printer" instead of your usual one. Choose a location on your PC to save your PDF file and Primo creates the file for you - no fuss. Queue Jumper: Have you ever waited by the printer, only to realise that your document is somehow jammed in the print queue and refuses to print? To make things worse, print jobs are often impervious to being deleted or cancelled, instead displaying an endless "deleting…" message that never completes. If this happens to you, the free Print Queue Cleaner program from www.tinyurl.com/PQcleaner will unclog and resolve print problems within seconds. Simply launch the program and click "Fix it" when you have print queue problems. Note, on the download page above, you can install the complete "MSI" version or merely save and run the "Portable" version from the links at the bottom of the page. Both work fine. IPrint: This is a clever utility to help cut down on unnecessary printing and waste. IPrint from www.clicktoconvert.com/iprint is free for home and business use, so there's potential savings at the office, too. It's beautifully simple: install the IPrint application, and like PrimoPDF above, it adds a virtual printer to your computer, alongside your existing printer drivers. This IPrint printer acts as a middle man between Windows and your real printer. Print to the IPrint virtual printer, and you'll see a preview of your output before it's printed, allowing you economise in several clever ways: scale down pages to fit multiple pages on each sheet of paper, or delete any pages you don't want to print (such as overrunning text or long e-mail messages). You can also accumulate print jobs from different files or applications, then squeeze them on to single pages or delete unwanted pages as if you are working with a single print job. When you're done, click the Print button, choose the printer you wish to use, and print in the usual way - problem solved. The Mercury (c) 2014 Independent Newspapers (Pty) Limited. All rights strictly reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |