Brettia

We have an HP Photosmart 2610 printer, one of those all-in-one thingies. It does really well at printing Word documents and photos, but it has a tendency to be temperamental when it comes to printing anything made in InDesign or Photoshop or other programs like that. Today I was printing 100 copies of a brochure that I made in InDesign for a class project, and it was going horrendously slowly. My “brochure” is a double-sided guide to “safe and secure computing,” and the printer was literally taking over a minute just to print one side of it, even when I was using “Fast Normal” mode, which on my printer is a step below Normal 600 DPI resolution but a step above saves-ink-looks-crappy FastDraft. I printed the first set of 50 copies for one location where I’m distributing it (a requirement of the project) in InDesign, and it probably took over two hours altogether. When I had finished that set, my mom suggested that I try exporting it to PDF and then printing it using Adobe Reader. I had never thought to do this before, though we export PDFs of the Cooney Crier to send to the printing company each issue. I exported my brochure using the same PDF settings, opened it in Adobe Reader, told it to print 50 copies of the first side, and voilà! Now it prints a side in about 20-25 seconds, which still isn’t nearly as fast as a Word document but is far better than before. So my new recommendation when something just won’t print correctly or won’t print at all is to simply export it as a PDF using whatever program you made the document in, or if you’re using Word, there’s a nice open-source program called PDFCreator that installs a special printer on your system that will output PDFs of documents instead of actually printing anything. You can use that to export PDFs from pretty much any program that allows you to print, even if the program doesn’t export PDFs on its own.

End random blurb.