Wednesday, February 4

Russin' Frussin' Printer

I've an HP Deskjet 9800 A3 printer so I can print large format artwork. In general, I'm fairly happy with it, but I didn't get the prototypes in the post today, and it was all down to the printer.

The first problem occurred yesterday. I wanted to print out the board art, ready for gluing onto the greyboard, but my printer was having a hissy-fit. It was printing everything mirrored. All the text was backwards and the art was reversed. Weird. After a while rooting around in the printer settings I found a 'mirror-image' setting, which was inexplicably ticked. I un-ticked it. Tried again. Still mirrored.

Next stop was HP's support forums. I searched and couldn't find anything, so I tried their 'Instant Chat' support feature. Well, I would have done, had I been able to use it, I needed a product code and a serial code, the serial code was clear enough on the back of the printer, but the three things that could have been the product code didn't work, and the 'where do I find the codes' section only covered computers, not printers.

Time for a general Google search. This throws up a potential driver problem, and suggests installing the drivers for an entirely different printer, and using those drivers to interface with the 9800. Finally, it works!

Today I was trying to print the rule-books and it took a while to get the right settings in InDesign to get it to print the A5 rulebook in booklet format. Even when I thought it was working it was offsetting everything on the page so that some of the text and art was clipped. Needless to say I've wasted a lot of paper and (very expensive) ink in the last couple of days.

I've now got everything printed successfully, the rulebooks folded and stapled, and the boxes made. All that remains is the spray-gluing and posting, which I'll do tomorrow.

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