At our office I occasionally have a problem getting Adobe InDesign CS2 to print to Tray 4 on our Xerox DocuColor 2240 copier. It’s been a frustrating, intermittent problem and having recently re-re-re-discovered the solution to the problem (software inspired user error) I’ve decided to publish it here in hopes of foregoing further frustration in the future and perhaps ensuring a reduction of my public use of alliteration.
The way it works is this: the DocuColor normally defaults to Tray 3 for all Letter size prints so we keep that tray stocked with inexpensive workaday paper and reserve Tray 4 for the quality stuff. That way I can be printing proposals while other people print out their normal working documents. It works just fine in every application but InDesign, which sometimes mysteriously works, but from time to time insists on printing to Tray 3, regardless of how many times I instruct it to use Tray 4.
This has caused me on several occasions to load Tray 3 with good paper, run back to my desk to print the document, run back to monitor the print job then yank the tray open and remove the “good” paper as soon as the print job is finished in case someone else has a print job in the queue behind me. No use in printing normal stuff on the good paper.
It’s made me feel especially silly considering the fact that I know that I’ve had a way to make it work in the past.
I suppose you could call it one of my personal “lost secrets”, like how to make hydraulic cement or watered steel or Greek fire.
I had it, then I lost it.
A personal defeat to be sure.
Then, this past Friday, I rediscovered the secret.
The problem? Click over to the “setup” portion of the Print dialogue box and look for the drop-down menu for “paper size”. Make sure that it is set for “Defined by Driver” and not for any one paper size in particular. That one move should do the trick by instructing InDesign to obey any paper tray assignations you’ve made. It’s a satisfying sensation to have fine control over your equipment.
I hope that this helps others, though it’s really posted here as a helper for me since I have little doubt that I’ll be dialing this page up at some point in the future, having forgotten the setup process all over again.
[tags]InDesign, how to, how-to, print, printer, problem, wrong, tray, dialogue, box, Xerox, DocuColor, 2240, driver[/tags]
