Under an agreement with the PSGA, each student receives a $25/semester Print Management  allocation, with any remaining balance carrying forward.  This enables the student to print 500 b/w pages per semester at $0.05 per page. 

CTS also installed duplex printers with lower per-page rates that allow you to stretch that allocation to approximately 1200 b/w double sided pages each semester.

When you log onto a computer you will receive a pop-up dialog box showing your print balance. The dialog box includes a link (“Details…”) that you can use to review your print history and its environmental impact at any time. When you send something to the printer you will receive a confirmation dialog box showing what the print job will cost, and you must confirm to continue.

To make the system more forgiving - and to accommodate emergencies, the system also allows each student another $10 in overdraft printing (another 200 pages) to cover emergency needs like an assignment that must be printed Sunday at midnight when offices are closed.

Printing Tips

Below are some helpful tips you can use to maximize your print allocation, reduce your cost, and reduce your environmental impact.

Use black & white unless color is specifically needed. B/W pages cost $0.05 per page (or as little as $0.03 for double-sided) while the rate for color is $0.35 per page. If you have a 15-page paper you have written that is mostly text - but has a photo or graphic on page 6 that you want printed in color - print page 6-7 on the color printer and send the rest of it (the test part) to a b/w printer. If you send the whole job to the color printer it will cost you $5.60. but if you send pages 1-5 and 8-16 to the b/w printer and page 6-7 to the color printer, that same job will only cost you $1.12 ($0.42 for the 14 b/w pages and $0.70 for the two color pages).

All public CTS printers are set to duplex printing by default. You can change that setting to single-sided printing when you submit a print job, but that will cost you more.  

Print only what you actually need to print. If your instructor posts a 112-page excerpt to Blackboard/Moodle and asks you to read pages 40-60, only print those pages. 

Choose your Font Carefully

You can actually cut ink/toner use just by choosing the right font. One recent study estimates that you can use up to 31% less ink just by picking the right font (Century Gothic uses 31% less ink/toner than Arial.) See the full article.

Print Multiple pages of your document on each sheet of paper 

Print multiple pages of a document on a single sheet of paper. Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all allow you to do this easily. 

Microsoft Word

To print several pages per side:

• On the File menu, click Print.
• Under Zoom, click the option you want in the "Pages per sheet" drop down menu to select the number of pages you want to print on each side of the sheet.

To selectively print certain pages

• Choose File/Print
• in the print dialog box, enter the range of pages you want to print "12-16"
• you can enter multiple page ranges by separating each range by a comma, as in "12-16, 19-20, 22, 30-36"
• use this strategy to selectively print pages to color or black and white printers.

Microsoft PowerPoint

To print several slides per page:

• Under the file menu, choose print and then print preview
• Click the options button, and then choose the scale to fit paper option
• Click print, and then click the properties button.
• Under the multiple page dropdown arrow, you can choose to place 2 slides on 1 page, 4 slides on 1 page, etc.

Microsoft Excel

To print several sheet on one page:

• On the Page Layout tab, choose the Print Area option and highlight the area you wish to print.
• Under the file menu, choose print and then print preview.
• Click page setup, and then under scaling choose fit to 1 page wide by 1 page tall.
• Click print, and then click the properties button.
• Under the multiple page dropdown arrow, you can choose to place 2 pages on 1, 4 pages on 1, etc.