Printing
Printing your digital documents can be accomplished in many ways at RIT. Some departments choose to outfit individual computers with personal printers, such as USB inkjet printers. These typically provide a low entry cost, but may their consumables (ink cartridges, etc.) may be quite expensive over time. Other departments choose to use one or more shared printers that are attached to the RIT network. If you are using such a setup, we recommend that you contact ITS for up-and-running assistance.
No matter what kind of printing you choose, we strongly recommend that you contact us for recommendations on specific devices and check with the RIT Purchasing department for the best prices. ITS may not have specific recommendations for a printer, but we often do have advice against certain devices. The RIT Purchasing department maintains information about preferred vendors and methods of purchasing devices so that you get the best deal possible.
In general, we have good luck with networked printers that support:
- Adobe PostScript
- 10 or 100 Mbit Ethernet
- Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) or Line Printer Daemon (LPD/LPR) protocols.
The IPP protocol is becoming more common and is supported in Mac OS X 10.2 and later, and we now suggest its use if your networked printer or print server is compatible with it. Printers available after 2003 are more likely to support it. LPD/LPR can be used successfully with most printers that do not work well with IPP. We do not recommend the use of AppleTalk when printing; see our AppleTalk support statement.
Note: AppleTalk routing is no longer available on the RIT campus network as of July 24, 2006. This could affect connections to file servers, network printers, and inter-application communication. While RIT’s network does not disable or prevent the use of the AppleTalk protocol itself, the lack of AppleTalk routing does prevent that traffic from:
- going across network segment boundaries (or subnets)
- traversing the RIT backbone.
Because of this ITS will not be able to support or troubleshoot AppleTalk related problems. For more information, see our AppleTalk support statement page.
We provide a Printing FAQ to help answer common questions.
We also have information on other printing topics:
- AppleTalk support statement
- Connect to a printer with Mac OS X
- Finder application
- Five folders for fonts in Mac OS X
- Font formats compatible with Mac OS X
- Mac OS X Location tips
- Mac OS X log files
- Microsoft Office
- Print Center application
- Print to a LocalTalk-based PostScript laser printer
- Print to an AppleTalk printer with Mac OS X
- Printing FAQ
- Recent updates
- Reignition application
- Set up Mac OS X for on-campus Ethernet
- Set up Mac OS X for on-campus wireless
- Set up an LPR desktop printer queue on Mac OS 9
- Software
- System Preferences application
- Turn off display of shared printers in Mac OS X
- USB connector
- Use a Macintosh