Printing in Van Munching Hall and DC  

Here you can find an overview of printing and instructions on how to print from a personal laptop.

Note: Printing is the most site-specific of all of our technologies. College Park and DC have similar infrastructures, but Baltimore and Shady Grove are very different. Students and Baltimore and Shady Grove should ask their local tech support staff about the best way to use printing at those sites.

Undergraduate Students:

You need to stick to the UMCP's Pharos system, or the WEPA kiosks located around Van Munching Hall. If you are not familiar with WEPA it's worth checking out -- it offers web-based printing from laptops, printing straight from USB keys, and color and duplex printing.

Graduate Students:

Graduate students get a per-semester quota of 600 pages. The quota is reflected as $60 of credit at $.10 a page -- the same price used by the other pay for print systems on campus. To use this allocation you need to print either in computer labs to the lab printers or via the web printing interface. There is no way to refill or increase your quota; after it is exhausted you can use the UMCP Pharos system or the WEPA kiosks located around Van Munching Hall to pay for additional pages.

The Smith School's printing system for graduate students is at http://print.rhsmith.umd.edu. Logins are via your University Directory account.

Note: The $60 is pretend money used as a way remind you of the real cost of printing. There's no way to get "real" cash from this.

Checking Quota:

Remember, your quota is an initial $60 balance, reset every semester. In the software, it's called the account balance.

On lab machines, your quota will appear in a pop-up window from a tray icon.

Clicking on the Account Balance or Details links will take you to the printing website, which has detailed balance and print history information. It's also how you can check your quota without having the client installed. In the picture below you can see the balance of $44.70 reflected on the web page.

Also highlighted on the picture are the next two things we want to talk about, Recent Print Jobs and Web Print.

Recent Print Jobs -- Requesting a refund when printing goes bad:

Bad things happen to good print jobs. Paper jams, low toner, and other problems can occur. If these things happen to you, you can request that your job be partially or totally refunded.

First, click on Recent Print Jobs from the main page of the printing site. You will see a list of your recent print jobs.

In the last column, labeled Status, there is a link to request a refund for your print job. Click that link and you will get a form to request a full or partial refund. Please include a justification for the request for our administrators to review. If it's an especially big refund being requested, you might want to keep your wrecked printout in case Smith IT needs to see some proof.

Web Print -- Print from your laptop to the lab printers:

Our system includes a way for you to use your print allocation directly from your laptop, without the need to use a lab machine for printing. For convenience, this system uses a web interface where you submit your jobs rather than special printer drivers that would otherwise need to be installed on your computer.

First, click on Web Print from the main page of the printing site. You will start a "wizard" that will walk you through the printing process. First, hit the "Submit a job" link. You will be asked to pick the printer you want to use from a list of available devices. The Location / Department column will help you figure out which printer you might want to use.

After picking your printer, you get to say how many copies of the document you'd like to print. Finally, you get to upload your document.

Click the Choose File button to pick the file you want to print. The system supports Microsoft Office and Acrobat files.

When Upload & Complete is hit, the file is uploaded to the print server and automatically opened and printed. You are shown a status page that describes what is happening to your document.

NOTE: Once uploaded, files are printed and immediately deleted. No history of files printed is preserved beyond a log of their file name. If you want to retain your file, stick it on your "K" drive.