bloggingIT

I was having a great deal of trouble installing printer drivers in Vista for the Xerox Phaser 6100.

Online, Xerox say that the XP drivers wok fine in Vista, so use them until the new drivers come out. I’ve spent two hours trying the get the badger to work.

And what was it in the end? Stupid driver defaults!

• Right-click on the printer
• Click run as administrator
• Click properties
• Clear any UAC prompts
• Click on the Advanced tab
• Click ‘Printing Defaults…’
• Click Graphics
• Click ‘Adjust Color’
• Click ‘reset’
• Keep pressing OK until the windows are cleared

Now send a print job! That’s it. Really!

I’ve been looking for some software to help me compile web-based documentation for a school that we work in.

What they are trying to do is write coursework modules for staff to follow, and then have them available on a site.

I know how this ends up. One of the ideas I had when they told me that they were writing modules was to put it all in word, and then generate PDFs at the end, using the headers for bookmarks in Adobe.

It was sound until I was told that there must be ‘no scrolling’, so that pupils with a 2-second timespan might be able to read it. I’m not convinced that the no-scrolling is the way to go, but I suppose it’s no better one way or another.

So, here we are. I’ve scoured the internet looking for something that will do the job nicely. I found some modules on the PEAR site that would allow me to create documentation and store links in a database. I liked the look of it, but it seemed that I might have been going a little off-track as with HTML Menu, I’d probably end up storing all of the data in HTML pages that I’d still manage and then place the menu in a database. Not fun.

Luckily, an offshoot of a PEAR project surfaced called PHP Dcoumentor while has some useful documentation (surprise, surprise), and seems to be able to generate documentation into a variety of formats from XML or DTD, which can’t be bad.

Steve was perplexed as to why we are doing this, when it means that we would have to go through everything that the tutors have written for the modules and reformat it. Ironically, if they had settled on my PDF idea in the first place, then it’s feasible that we could have used the Word styles as a starting block for the online styles.

Still, if someone wants to pay me to make documents look pretty, then I’m all for it.

I found a really useful page over at HVS Media today.

The site has various images showing you the dimensions of various slip case inlays and sleeves so that you can easily create fresh artwork for this kind of media.

Check it out.

I had a problem with a newly installed server that was the print server for about 12 - 15 printers.

The printers were dotted around the site and connected to Intel print servers themselves to allow them to be available on the network.

It was reported to me that the server repeatedly stopped allowing you to print and it was true, when I checked the spooler service, it had stopped.

After examining the event log, I found the following information messages appear every 6 seconds:

Printer \\server\printer was set.

This was cycling through around 6 printers - and possibly meant a lot of network and server bandwidth was being chewed up.

All of the printers connected happened to be Brother 1230 or Brother 1430 printers. Oddly, the Brother 1240 printers were unaffected (possibly because they were series 40).

Anyway, after poking around the printer settings and the registry, I found the problem to be that the printers were using the native Brother print processor.

To remedy:

• Open Printers and Faxes
• Right-click on the printer and click Properties
• Click the ‘Avanced’ tab
• Click ‘Print Processor…
• Select WinPrint and RAW
• Press ‘OK’ and ‘OK’

Now go back to the settings and check that the print processor is still using WinPrint. If it is not, you also need to disable ‘Advanced Print Services’ in the ‘Advanced’ tab.