[comp.text.tex] laser printer fees

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 


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