Today in the busy PaperCut offices Peter was runing tests of his PCL6 print job watermarking feature over our corpus of test documents. This involves quite a bit of printing and unfortunately we suffered a rather nasty paperjam. The first few attempts by us to remove the paperjam did not have the best results.

Then my System Administrator brain kicked in and I remembered two simple tricks that I thought I would share with everyone.

1) Be Thorough!
When you have a difficult to remove paper jam in your device, keep all of the pieces of paper as you pull them out. Reassemble it like a puzzle. If you don’t have a complete page you have missed something!

By doing this we could tell that there was a remaining tiny piece of paper, somewhere deep in the paper path of our copier.

2) Use what’s at hand.
That tiny piece of paper was no where to be seen. We could see where the paper was jaming but couldn’t see inside to remove it. Most of the time, fixing this is going to require either calling in a repair tech (if under warranty / service agreement) or pulling the entire thing apart.

What I’ve learnt is that using 150-200GSM paper and manually feeding it through the paper path by hand can often dislodge the offending piece. If I don’t have a piece of heavy weight card around I can simply fold an A4/Letter piece of paper in half, length wise, and feed that through. This tip has saved me many hours and more than a few dollars worth of service calls, not to mention my sanity!

That reminds me, when I sat back down at my desk an my PaperCut installation had notified me that the print was in error. Have YOU setup your PaperCut system notifications? These notifications can inform you of low toner issues, paperjams and much more.

With the release of iOS 4.2, finally Apple iPads and iPhones can print! Of course the this possibility opens up many questions, particularly from network administrators managing printing in schools, colleges and Universities. How do I control AirPrint printing and prevent a student free-for-all? It’s been such a popular question and hot topic on our support queue that we’ve started work straight away on an iPad print control option. The aim is to ensure all of PaperCut’s core features such as print quotas, print control, and print cost allocation to accounts are all available to users using iPads and iPhones. Our approach builds on AirPrint by providing IP address based authentication on top of the Mac OS X server AirPrint exposed print queues (via CUPS and Bonjour/mDNS). Read more about PaperCut’s iPad Printing Print Control Options in the PaperCut tour. It’s all been prototyped and is currently with the software development team to be included in a point release of PaperCut version 11 at no extra cost. We’ll keep you posted.