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My mom had me make some invitations for that graduation party. Coming up with the actual design (outside and inside)* wasn’t a problem, but printing them out was. Since for some reason, I couldn’t print from my laptop to the printer in Ryan’s room, my mom did it from her laptop (we had it downstairs). And I originally had the entire card take up an entire 8.5 x 11in. sheet of paper, but Mom wanted to be able to fit two cards on one sheet. So I figured that since each card (when not folded) would take up half a sheet, I only have to shrink the entire card down by 50%, right? RIGHT? I did that and sent them to Mom via e-mail as PDFs (since she doesn’t have Photoshop).

*All right, I lie. It was actually Mocha who designed them. I guess she forgave me for screwing up her website.

WRONG. It wound up being a bit big when Mom imported them into Microsoft Publisher (and weirdly enough, I didn’t understand the logic of that until just now O_o). And resizing them (which pixelates the lines) didn’t help. So I arranged it all in Photoshop myself in a letter-sized document and gave it to her as a PDF (this time via USB drive…I couldn’t e-mail it, since the size of the e-mail exceeded the limit). And because it still wouldn’t fit in a letter-sized Publisher document (huh?), she ended up resizing it and it still wound up looking pixely.

By now, I managed to reinstall the drivers for the printer onto my laptop (I don’t know what happened to the old ones) and print it from Photoshop. It looked good…except it was horribly misaligned (the entire thing was bumped off by a couple inches). And I didn’t know how to fix it. :x Then my mom realized that she could just print it from Adobe Reader (since everything is already laid out). And I realized ‘oh yeah…’ (I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before ._.;).

Then printing out twenty cards on cardstock was no problem. Once they were printed out, I cut them up using a paper cutter we have (which our nextdoor neighbors uses more than we do) and folded them. Mom got some envelopes and faced the next battle: printing out everyone’s addresses. She thought it might be easier than writing them out by hand, but the printer for some reason kept grabbing the letter-sized paper (regular printer paper, not cardstock) instead of the envelopes, even though she had specified the tray with the envelopes. So she took out all the letter-sized paper and printed again, only to have it print on the letter-sized paper again.

But wait, didn’t she already take out all the paper and put in envelopes? So where was this paper coming from? I thought that maybe it had a secret stash, but she found more printer paper somewhere (in another tray?). Except this time, the printer was expecting something to be in the tray she just emptied, so she put the envelopes in that one. But now, I think it was trying to take envelopes from the other tray, because she wound up putting the envelopes in both trays.

Umm…eventually she managed to print out all the envelopes. And I managed to fill them all. And we had Lorin put the postage stamps on them.

I remember that the staff at church had trouble with their printer/copier. And at school, the printer at the Art Complex’s main computer lab either couldn’t be connected to by one of the other computers or it just wouldn’t work for other reasons (aside from running out of ink). And the printers in the smaller computer lab? When I had to print out photos for Digital Photography last semester, I had trouble getting one of them to print. And the first awkward printer I had to deal with would be the one I used before I got my MacBook a couple years ago (about half the time, it couldn’t grab the paper, sometimes I had to help it, and sometimes if it did grab it, it would jam). Then again, my mom said that printer was getting old.

So, anyone else have any weird printer stories to share?

Modified: June 05th, 2008