Amusing Manual Printing Story

ROZ wrote on 1/15/2002, 4:48 PM
I first took the .pdf on disc to Office Depot. To my horror, they wanted over $300 to print a color manual! Ouch- no way. So I went home and loaded some high quality inkjet paper into my HP Deskjet v40. Tried a test run of printing the first 10 odd pages- no problem. Fed these back into the printer to print the first 10 even pages on the reverse side- no problem. Printed the next 50 even pages- no problem. Turned them over, fed them in, came back to find that for no reason, two odd pages were skipped- big problem! Printer must have picked up two sheets at once. I had to reprint using smaller batches, and fought the whole process for hours. I finally had a beautiful print job done- in color! I took the manual to Office Depot, and I asked them to bind the manual with one of those nice-looking black plastic multi-perforated binders. They quoted a price of about $3.00, told me they could bind it right then and there. They said come back in five minutes and it would be ready- browse around the store, etc. I came back, and yes the morons had bound the Vegas manual on the wrong side! Dang- I wanted to kill somebody! They then offered to run every sheet through their color laser printer and rebind it on the correct side. Normally that would have cost about a dollar a page to print. I came back in an hour, and they had finished. To my surprise, they took a heavy duty paper cutter to cut off the right-side one quarter inch of paper where the old perforation holes had been copied. They did the same modification to the original, and they gave me both copies at no charge. What an ordeal!!!!!!!

Comments

wvg wrote on 1/15/2002, 4:59 PM
LOL! I feel your pain. :-) I had a similar experience with the paper feeding as I related in another thread. I happen to have one of those sprial binding machines, but no combs large enough for 180 sheets. So me too, off to my local office supply store. Turns out there isn't much demand for that size so all they had were boxes of a 100 for $56. Since I wasn't about to pay that, I walked up to the main counter and asked if I could just buy one, half expected they would say no. But they said yes, and I got two combs for just fifty cents. Now I got a nice full sized color spiral bound manual.

What really bugs me in the cost of the ink which is highway robbery for color ink jet printers. For about $40 more I could have walked out with a new 1200 DPI printer. Oh well.
PKowald wrote on 1/15/2002, 5:06 PM
I made 3 small wire spiral bound manuals rather than one big one. It does go to show you that when you sit on a PC to edit etc, many of us still like the good old paper manual to read away from the PC - in a more relaxing reading position!

PK