Troubleshooting Printing issues at CAE
How to troubleshoot print issues with CAE Printers.
Printers can sometimes be personified as troublesome and petulant, but here are some things that can help solve some of the mysterious things that happen when running into trouble printing a document:
Please note, CAE does not guarantee the print quality from our printers. You should expect "draft" quality, with the potential for lines and smudges. Refunds will not be given for low print quality, unless it is illegible. If you need professional quality, such as for resumes, please use a professional print shop.
General Troubleshooting:
Notice that most of these involve PDF files. These bring certain challenges as a small PDF file can be rendered into a giant monster by the program that opened it, causing the printer to fail on a job that seems reasonable.
-If you are printing a large PDF file, you may want to send it to the printer a few pages at a time. This keeps large jobs from bogging down the print queue, as well as make it easier for the printer to process. Otherwise you can use the printers in ME 1262 or CAE 116 which are built to handle larger sized jobs such as these.
-Save PDF files to your desktop instead of printing them straight from a web browser.
-Occasionally a downloaded PDF's settings will somehow get screwed up and the printer won't print it correctly. When this happens, print the PDF as another PDF by selecting CutePDF writer from the list of printers.
-If a document is getting hung up one page, or printing the same pages over and over, try converting the document to a pdf and printing that as an image: https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/72166
-If a printer is jammed or out of paper, call the CAE Help Desk at 262-5349, don't try to fix it as your account can be suspended for messing with CAE equipment. Sometimes trying to fix it makes things much worse, and it is generally not hard to determine who did it.
-All of CAE's duplex printers default to print double sided. If you wish to print a document single sided, you must go into the printer properties (Ctrl+P, then click on Properties) and switch from "Print on both sides" to "Print on one side only".
-Please note that CAE printers only have Letter (8.5x11) and Tabloid(11x17) sized paper available. If you have a print job that won't send to the printer, you may be printing a size that is unavailable. The print server has been configured to reject jobs that aren't on the right sized paper.
-If printing from Google Chrome, regardless of what kind of file you are printing, be sure to check the print settings. Chrome has been known to occasionally default to printers that aren't even in the same building as the lab you are printing from.
-Printers will not print a blank piece of paper.
Print account balance not showing:
There are a couple of reasons that your balance may not show up properly in the CAE system. The most common reason is that CAE does not use the campus print system. If you put a balance on the campus print system (Go Print), it will not show up on the CAE balance. You should add money to your WisCard, The other reason that your balance may not show is if you recently had your WisCard replaced. The new WisCard number may not be updated in the CAE system. You can now manually update this by logging into my.cae.wisc.edu and clicking "Refresh Campus Sync" under Account Tools (https://account.my.cae.wisc.edu/account/refresh), then click Refresh Data.
Possible issues by Lab:
116 and 121 CAE:
- Computers in these labs print to the printers in room 116. The main issue people run into is accidentally printing to the color printer, which results in a much larger charge to the print account. When printing from a computer in these rooms, be sure your print job is being sent where you want it to go, cae-116-duplex for black and white jobs or cae-116-color for color print jobs.
Plotters in EH 1249 and ME 1200 wing:
- These rooms have a color plotter in addition to the black and white printers. As with the 3 rooms listed above, be sure you have the correct printer selected for where you want to print, which are as follows:
EH 1249: engr-1249-plotter for poster sized prints and engr-1249-duplex for black and white print jobs.
ME 1235, 1245, 1255, 1263: me-1262-plotter for poster prints and me-1262-duplex for black and white print jobs.