Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!helios!skdutta
From: skdutta@cs.tamu.edu (Saumen K Dutta)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: laser printer fees
Keywords: we pay through the nose.
Message-ID: <5820@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 13 Jun 90 05:12:27 GMT
References: <1091@unicorn.WWU.EDU>
Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU
Distribution: usa
Organization: Computer Science Department, Texas A&M University
Lines: 48

>At our fine university, LaTeX and all it's cousins are available for
>student use.
>.............
>..............
>..........

I am very suprised to know that your university is charging 25
cents per page of Laser printing. A look at our university acc-
ounting utility shows that they are accounting 2 cents for every
page that go out of the laser printer. This may look less
considering our university in funded by state. Still I think
that 25 cents is too much of money for this if you consider the
price of Laser Printers have come down so much these days. I
don't know what to say about your department policy but I can
give you few suggestions for saving your money. 
 
1. If you have access to SUN, DEC or HP workstations, you
   don't have to print every LaTex pages. There are good
   previewers available which let you see the output on the 
   screen. So you can do your editing on the computer and take
   the final output on Laser Printer.
   
2. Some drivers for dotmatrix printers are also available   
   which takes .dvi files and print the output in a reasonable
   manner ( I am not saying that you can get the same quality,
   but you can always use it for draft.)    
   
3. Troff is much better in this respect. You can use nroff to see
   the output on the screen of your text terminal. This ofcourse 
   will not give you lot's of information about superscript,
   subscript, font etc. but you can use it for quick look and
   draft. Printer drivers for nroff also comes with the basic
   package and it can give you good output in almost all the dot
   matrix printers ( you can even configure the driver according
   to the type of the printer).
 
Note: In any of the above cases you can get output nowhere near
      the quality of a Laser Printer but I think for
      learning it is okay!
 
Disclaimer: The above opinions are mine 


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