Why am I sometimes charged for blank pages when I print in the IU STCs?

The most common reason for blank pages being charged against your Student Technology Center (STC) printing allotment is a page break at the end of a document. Authors may insert these unintentionally; some authors also insert blank pages into the middle of their documents for readability or for note taking.

As page boundaries are not meaningful on web pages, printing web pages (which often have no page breaks) can produce similar results. Any trailing blanks or line feeds may result in a blank page at the end of the document.

The STC print management system assumes blank pages like these are intentional, and prints them as blank pages. To avoid this, you can use Print Preview and print only those pages with material printed on them.

Less commonly, duplex (two-sided) printing can cause issues. When printing a document in duplex (or when printing on a printer set to duplex by default), if a document has an odd number of pages, the application will usually reset the printer to simplex for the last page so the printer does not run two print jobs together; all Microsoft Office and Adobe applications behave this way. This also ensures that the user's STC printing allotment reflects the proper page count.

If the document has an odd number of pages and you print it in duplex, some applications (e.g., Firefox and Internet Explorer) insert a blank page at the end of the document to force the document to print correctly. This is a simpler solution, but it introduces error into the printing allotment process and causes confusion for the user.

To reduce errors, UITS strongly recommends that you download web-based materials to the desktop before printing (especially if you are printing in duplex).

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