Using Your Print Settings to Save Paper
One of the most obvious advantages electronic documents have over their paper cousins is the reduction in paper wastage. The benefits are twofold: you save money and reduce the impact on the environment that occurs during the production, distribution and disposal of the paper and ink.
At Nitro PDF Software, we’ve found that working with electronic documents over many years, especially PDF, has resulted in a few obvious benefits:
- Doing most document reviewing on screen, has forced our team to become more skillful and adaptable, making them more efficient and able to embrace any new technologies we introduce.
- Our information is easier to retrieve as there’s no paper trail. Using search, we’re able to track any info down quickly — from anywhere. Nothing seems to get lost as everything is backed up.
- In our attempt to use less paper we’ve been forced to improve our working environment so it’s more conducive to working onscreen. With each enhancement or addition – such as giving everyone at least two monitors – we further improve the experience, making less and less dependent on paper.
When printing is a must
All that said, there are still times when paper is the best (or only) answer. For example, proofing the final copy of a document or artwork before it’s off to the printers always feels better on paper – you seem to have a finer control and gain a better perspective from which you can pick up those critical last minute mistakes.
There are other times when printing is required out of necessity. Say, for example, your team has a meeting on and you’re not all equipped to view via a laptop or similar means. This occurs for us when we’re reviewing product specifications, going through web and marketing metrics, and other things. In a nutshell, these printed materials are either early draft materials, or content that is for internal use only – in each case, the content being more important than how well it is presented.
When a situation like the above occurs, we can look to our printer settings to save paper.
More than halving the paper you use
A much unheralded feature in most good desktop publishing applications and document viewers is n-up or multi-page printing. The technique is pretty much the foundation of the printing world – you print multiple pages on the one piece of paper (and then arrange them in the right order). The functionality appears on many print dialogs, from Microsoft Word to Nitro PDF Professional. In the screenshot below I’ll show Nitro Pro, but many applications support similar functionality.
If your printer and eyesight is of reasonable quality then you should find that printing two pages per one printed page should be OK for light reviewing and referencing. For content with less text, such as PowerPoint- or PDF-based presentations, you’ll often find you can fit anywhere between four and nine slides per sheet of paper. That’s a massive amount of paper savings if you’re about to give your presentation out to a whole team.
It’s hard to imagine improving efficiency by more than 50% with one extra mouse click, but when printing, the option is right there in front of you.
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