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Printing at CAE
All about printing at CAE
The Computer-Aided Engineering Center has black and white printers available in most of the CAE computer labs (https://www.cae.wisc.edu/labs/). There are also two plotters (EH 1249 and ME 1262*) and a color printer (CAE 116).
Printing is charged to your WisCard. CAE CANNOT ACCESS YOUR GoPrint BALANCE. FUNDS MUST BE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR GENERAL WisCard BALANCE. If you do not have a balance on your WisCard, you can find information about your WisCard here: https://wiscard.wisc.edu/ . There are some situations where you may carry a balance in the printing system PaperCut. In these instances, your PaperCut balance will be charged before your WisCard. CAE has no mechanism in place for departmental paper purchases for printing in CAE labs.
NOTE: If you just activated, or replaced your WisCard, your funds may not appear in our record for up to 7 days. If this is the case, please let the CAE Help Desk know that you have a new WisCard so that we can manually sync the information.
Printers are provided for printing homework, and other related coursework. The printers are not meant for high-quality print jobs, such as resumes. CAE does not guarantee anything better than draft quality printing. Loading paper of any kind into the paper trays is not allowed.
The CAE Help Desk monitors the printer in CAE labs. Alerts are sent when the printer is in need of service. These notifications may take 15 minutes or more to reach the Help Desk. If you are waiting to resolve a printer issue, please contact the CAE Help Desk (helpdesk@cae.wisc.edu) or call 262-5349. Opening a printer to add paper or clear a jam is not allowed, and may result in the suspension of your CAE account. Please do not clear paper jams. Instead, call the CAE Help Desk for assistance.
IT IS IMPORTANT to review your print settings. Sometimes, a program will select the wrong printer. Chrome is particularly bad about this. It will select a previously used printer instead of the nearest lab printer. In addition, be sure to review the duplex settings, and be sure that you are not accidentally printing to a plotter or the color printer.
CAE does not maintain a scanner. The nearest scanners can be found at the Steenbock and MERIT libraries, or at the Info Lab on the second floor of Union South.
Charges for printing on CAE Printers are as follows:
- $0.07 per black & white page or $0.05 per side for duplex
- $0.60 per color page
- $1.80 per linear foot on plotter printers
Please double check your print settings before releasing your print job from the print queue (see below). Refunds will be given for illegible prints. Jobs that are sent to the wrong printer (including, wrong lab, the color printer or plotter) are not eligible for refunds.
- $0.07 per black&white page or $0.05 per side for duplex
- $0.60 per color page
- $1.80 per linear foot on plotter printers
- Go to the following URL: https://print.engr.wisc.edu/user (You need to be connected to campus wifi)
- You will be prompted for a login. Please use your CAE Login and Password as shown below. Click Log In.
You will now be at your PaperCut Account Summary. The amount of pages remaining on your account is located on this page as "Balance". To access a summary of all the jobs you have printed this semester, simply click the recent print jobs link on the left hand side of the page.
You can also check your remaining print pages on a Linux machine by typing lpquot into the terminal.
General Troubleshooting:
-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.
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.
Printing problems are one of the most common issues that come to the CAE Help Desk. It can be difficult reproduce, diagnose and fix problems without information to work with. To gather as much information as possible up-front, CAE now requires submission of a print refund request form, found here: https://www.cae.wisc.edu/paper-refund-request/. While this takes slightly more time up front, it will help CAE investigate and resolve the problems more efficiently.
Filling out the Print Refund Request Form
Be sure you attach the file you were attempting to print. If that file is not attached, no refund will be given. The file that is submitted will ONLY be used to test the printer.
Below are the fields included on the request form, as well as an explanation of
what is needed for each entry and/or why we need the information. The first 3
fields are very straight forward, and simply gather contact information.
- Name
- CAE login
- Email Address
- Software/program printed from:
This allows us to figure out if it is a specific program or file type that is causing the issues printing. If you are printing a PDF from learn at UW, you should state the Web browser you printed it from (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc), and not simply say "browser." - Computer printed from:
This allows us to narrow down the cause to see if the problem is specific to one computer. Generally this entry should be WIN-#### or Tux-### (ex WIN-1005 or Tux-102). - Printer attempted:
This helps us figure out if it was a hardware issue with the printer. These are normally listed in a "Building-Room-Printer" format. EX. CAE-116-duplex or EH-2324-Plotter - Additional details:
This field should contain any other information you find necessary. Examples could be: The printer jammed when there was no one working at the Helpdesk to clear it; the printer ran out of paper when no one was around to refill it; only a few pages of my multi-page document printed; the printer had an error; the job just didn't print; etc.