OK. Now that it's after Christmas and we have given away the twins calendars, I can relate my difficulties with getting them printed.
For the past two years, we've created wall calendars with pictures of the twins. The top half has a picture or pictures of the twins from that month, but from the previous year. And the bottom half is the calendar grid, pre-labeled with holidays and family events. They are very popular with our out-of-town relatives. I must say they do turn out well.
Up until this year, we have printed the pictures and calendar grids out on separate pages, then glued the pages back-to-back with liquid cement. This is very time consuming and tedious. This year, I tried to avoid those headaches by buying double-sided paper.
When I opened the paper, it was not what I expected. It was matte, which I knew, but it just felt like regular ink jet paper, but thicker. The paper worked out really well, though, since it was bright enough to make the pictures look good, thick enough to be able to print on both sides, and the matte finish actually helped, since the paper could absorb more of the ink which allowed me to print several pictures all at once without worrying that the ink wouldn't be dry yet and rub off onto the other pages.
I printed all of the full-page pictures first, and then created the calendar grids in Excel. The Excel part was fun, since I set it up so that if we do a 2005 calendar, I'll just have to change a few dates. When I went to print the calendar grids on the backs of the picture pages, though, the printer would often refuse to feed the paper. More precisely, it would feed it a few inches and then report a jam, even though I could never see anything wrong with the paper or the paper path.
This went on for the entire time I printed the calendar grids. Sometimes, I could get 5 or 6 of them to print in a row. Sometimes, it would not feed one page until after I re-fed it 7 or 8 times. I tried feeding just one paper by itself. I tried filling the paper tray. I set the paper thickness to thin and thick. Every time I thought I hit on a workaround, the paper would "jam" again. It was maddening, and I stayed up until 11:45 one night to get them all done.
I have a theory as to what the problem might have been now. When I had to re-print one page (because the printer problems caused me to lose track of what month I was printing), I printed the calendar grid first, and then printed the picture on the other side. It printed both without problems, just after I spent 10 minutes trying to get one page to print. I think that the paper sensor the Epson Stylus Color 900 uses may be optical, so that if there is a lot of ink on the back of the page, it doesn't reflect enough light to let the printer know there is paper there.
So next year, not only will I have nice, time-saving dual-sided paper to use, but I will also print the calendar grids first and the pictures second. That should allow me to crank out those 2005 calendars with a lot less complaining.
Posted by Rob Reid at December 30, 2003 10:41 AM