n8743196@unicorn.WWU.EDU (jeff wandling) (06/12/90)
At our fine university, LaTeX and all it's cousins are available for student use. Currently, the powers that be at Western charge 25 cents per page for laser printed output. There are no free-bees, there is no experimenting; if you send it to the laser printer, you just coughed up two bits per page. We, the students have to live with this or the machines will disappear we are told. I guess you need a small fortune to learn how to use LaTeX, troff, etc... I'd like to know if this asinine policy is popular with other system administrators. If you could please e-mail me the low-down (cost, how it works, who pays who) about your laser printer use, I'd appreciate it. I'm compiling such information to help me do battle in getting the price per page lower. thanks in advance! ps. Even if you are not a system administrator, *please* respond about your situation or if you have suggestions. -- @desc me=jeff wandling n8743196@unicorn.wwu.edu jeff@arthur.wwu.edu
rouben@math9.math.umbc.edu (Rouben Rostamian) (06/13/90)
Jeff Wandling writes: > >At our fine university, LaTeX and all it's cousins are available for >student use. > >Currently, the powers that be at Western charge 25 cents per page >for laser printed output. > >I'd like to know if this asinine policy is popular with other system >administrators. There are two issues involved here: a) Is the 25 cents fee fair, and b) whether the students should be charged for using a printer. The fee of 25 cents is a bit off the mark if the administration indents to make the laser printers only self-supporting. I oversee the operations of math department's computing equipment at UMBC and I am very aware of the expenditures involved in providing a laser printing service. Here is a breakdown of the costs for an LN03plus laser printer, suitable for most text and graphics printing jobs: Fixed costs: Purchase price: $ 4,000 Terminal server port: 400 Annual costs: Maintenance contract with DEC: $ 700 Variable costs: Ream of paper (500 sheets) $ 4 Toner (prints 3,000 pages) 85 Maintenance kit (for every 10,000 pages) 200 From this data you may compute cost/page on this printer. You may need the following additional information: Pages printed per month at our cite: 8,000 Expected life of the printer: 5 years Therefore, over five years we print about 480,000 pages and we have the following expenditures: Cost of printer: $4,000 Server port: 400 Maintenance contract: 2,800 (first year under warrantee) Cost of toner: 13,600 Cost of maint. kits: 9,600 Cost of paper: 3,840 TOTAL EXPENDITURES: 34,240 for 480,000 pages Cost per page = 7.1 cents Note that this 7.1 cents is the _average_ cost of printing per page, so it applies to *everything* that you print, including those messed up sheets in TeX'ed documents that you later discard. At our site the policy is not to charge students (or anyone else) for printing costs. Printing is assumed to be a general operating expense as is providing heat and lighting in the buildings. We try to make the students aware though that laser printing is not entirely without its costs and that thoughlessly printing just about anything that comes across your screen should be avoided. In particular, for multiple copies of documents, it is generally cheaper to print one copy on a laser printer and reproduce additional copies by photocopying. For processing TeX documents we encourage the students to use workstations with dvi previewing capability. That way, they can fine-tune the appearance of your document on the screen before you send the (hopefully) final version to the printer. Rouben Rostamian Telephone: (301) 455-2458 Department of Mathematics and Statistics e-mail: University of Maryland Baltimore County rostamian@umbc.bitnet Baltimore, MD 21228, U.S.A. rostamian@umbc3.umbc.edu
skdutta@cs.tamu.edu (Saumen K Dutta) (06/13/90)
>At our fine university, LaTeX and all it's cousins are available for >student use. >............. >.............. >.......... I am very suprised to know that your university is charging 25 cents per page of Laser printing. A look at our university acc- ounting utility shows that they are accounting 2 cents for every page that go out of the laser printer. This may look less considering our university in funded by state. Still I think that 25 cents is too much of money for this if you consider the price of Laser Printers have come down so much these days. I don't know what to say about your department policy but I can give you few suggestions for saving your money. 1. If you have access to SUN, DEC or HP workstations, you don't have to print every LaTex pages. There are good previewers available which let you see the output on the screen. So you can do your editing on the computer and take the final output on Laser Printer. 2. Some drivers for dotmatrix printers are also available which takes .dvi files and print the output in a reasonable manner ( I am not saying that you can get the same quality, but you can always use it for draft.) 3. Troff is much better in this respect. You can use nroff to see the output on the screen of your text terminal. This ofcourse will not give you lot's of information about superscript, subscript, font etc. but you can use it for quick look and draft. Printer drivers for nroff also comes with the basic package and it can give you good output in almost all the dot matrix printers ( you can even configure the driver according to the type of the printer). Note: In any of the above cases you can get output nowhere near the quality of a Laser Printer but I think for learning it is okay! Disclaimer: The above opinions are mine -- _ ||Internet: skdutta@cssun.tamu.edu ( /_ _ / --/-/- _ ||Bitnet : skd8107@tamvenus.bitnet __)_/(_____(_/_(_/_(_(__(_/_______ ||Uucp : uunet!cssun.tamu.edu!skdutta .. ||Yellnet: (409) 846-8803