As everyone knows black and white printing in the Libraries costs $0.04 per single-sided sheet and $0.06 per double-sided sheet. Color printing costs $0.20 per single-sided sheet and $0.38 per double-sided sheet. While this sounds simple enough, the way the system calculates the cost of a print job can lead to some confusion.
Here are some examples of charges that may occur on a color printer:
A patron prints a 3 page document double-sided that contains no color to a color printer. The system will recognize that there is no color and will charge $0.06 for the double-sided sheet and $0.04 for the single-sided sheet, for a total of $0.10.
A patron prints a 3 page document double-sided that contains color on every page. The system will charge $0.38 for the double-sided sheet and $0.20 for the single-sided sheet, for a total of $0.58.
These relatively small print jobs; so, if a patron asked about one of these it would be fairly easy to explain how the total cost of the print job was calculated by the system. However, as you can see for larger print jobs it can quickly become difficult to accurately calculate the cost of a print job for a patron with out looking at every page of the document they're printing.
Take for example a 31 page document where pages 7, 8, 11, and 12 do not have any color on them, all of the other pages have color on them. The system will charge black and white double-sided rates for 7, 8, 11, and 12, color single-sided rates for page 31, and color double-sided rates for the other pages. Which means that this print job would cost $5.26 ($.012 + $0.20 + $4.94).
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