General
Web Print allows you to upload a document to PaperCut from anywhere and any computer. This can be really handy for folks who aren’t on campus but need to retrieve a print job as soon as they arrive*. They could log into PaperCut, submit their job, and then go to a PaperCut enabled printer to retrieve their job by simply signing into the printer after arival. Similarly it could be really handy for folks trying to print from a personal computer. For example, if a student was in a classroom on their personal computer, they could queue a job, then retrieve it at a PaperCut enabled printer location.
* Jobs held in the queue will remain for 6 hours. After that time they are deleted without warning. This is to prevent the server’s disk from filling and causing the entire print solution to fail.
Walkthrough
- First navigate you’re browser to https://papercut.champlain.edu. You’ll be greeted with the PaperCut login.
2. Log in with your standard Champlain username and password, and you’ll see a summary dashboard with some information about your account. Select Web Print from the menu on the left column.
3. Active Jobs will appear in this list. They are active until they’ve been rendered and placed in a hold queue. To submit a new print job select the same in blue letters.
4. The first step in submitting a job is to select the printer queue. We’ve configured two, one for black and white prints and the other for color prints. Black and white jobs can be retrieved at color printers, but color jobs can only be retrieved at color printers. If you’re printing in black and white, but retrieving the job at a color printer, selecting the black and white queue also helps the color printers use the black toner instead of mixing color toner to produce black.
5. Once you’ve selected the queue, the second step is to select the number of copies you would like.
6. Finally we can upload the document we want to print. Do so by dragging the document from Windows Explorer or OSX Finder onto the grey area. Alternatively you can click the button “Upload from Computer” and navigate to the file in a more traditional method. This page also shows you the document types that are compatible with the web print feature. If you have a document that is not one of these types, convert it to PDF and upload the PDF to Web Print. Once you’re done select upload and complete on the bottom right of the page (not visible in the image below).
7. Once you’ve uploaded the document you’ll be returned to the initial web print page where you can monitor the process of the job, you should see a green check with a succcess message.
8. Eventually, after the web print server has processed the job, the print will be transferred to the hold queue that you’ve selected. At this point the job will change status from Submitting to a hyperlink with the words Held in queue. You can go to a PaperCut enabled printer to retrieve your print. Alternatively you could use this same interface to release your print by clicking Held in queue . This interface also allows a user to print at a printer that doesn’t have a swipe card reader at it. I’ll cover that in a different walk-through.