The battle was strictly a technical one, but a draining and protracted one. As of yesterday, I was about ready to throw both printers out a window. Clenise had pretty well solved the print-quality issues by cleaning the printers’ components, installing new drum units and belt units and toner cartridges, and other actions. But then the printers would print a few pages, then “pause.” I have no idea why they would pause, but once they did, even if they resumed the print job was ruined. Sometimes I could get maybe 20 or so pages printed, and then I would coax the rest of the book’s pages out of a printer, but it took me all day to get about three full copies of the book.

I reinstalled the printer drivers and reset the printers to factory settings, but nothing worked. I finally decided the problem must somehow be related to the fact that both printers were on our home ethernet network, along with several computers, and somehow the data streams going to the printers were getting confused or interrupted by data going elsewhere. Or something like that. I don’t know much about the technical aspects of networking.

So today I finally decided to switch one of the printers to a USB connection directly to the computer. That seems to be working. Right now that printer is happily cranking out clean pages. I left the other printer on the network to see if the problem has cleared up, and so far it seems to be okay. The other printer also is printing continuously. I guess two identical printers on the same network caused confusion, though that system had worked quite well previously. Anyway, once I make sure this system works, I’m not going to change it one bit.

We haven’t received our new cutter blade yet; I think it will arrive Monday, and by then we should have enough copies printed that we can concentrate on cutting and binding. So things are looking up. Of course, we still haven’t found a way to control the high cost of color toner, but we’re taking things one step at a time.