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Printing (Big) Manuals?
Detritus writes "Many companies have stopped providing hardcopy manuals with their products, electing instead to deliver the manuals in the form of PDF files. This becomes a problem when you have an 800 page reference manual and you need a usable hardcopy that is double-side printed and bound. What is the most cost-effective way of turning a PDF file into a bound document? Cheap ink-jet printers are not designed to do this task at a reasonable speed and cost."
Sounds like PrintFu is what you're after.
there's more than one way to do me.
Most large doc are laid-out for printing on smaller paper and are actually oversized on A4/8.5x11. This is only good if you have reduced visual acuity. I don't, and usually go for the 4x to save paper and page flipping.
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/learn_book.a spx does mass printing of PDF files, double-sized, bound. Sure, it costs a little bit, but probably less than trying to pull it off yourself.
This sig intentionally left justified.
I was just looking at a very similar problem:
The Kinko's in SE Portland quotes me about $25 for a single copy, double side printing, comb bound with vinyl cover. Add $1 to do spiral bound. There would be a discount for multiple copies-- and at this price doing a copy for each of us, and a couple of spares for the Jolt spills, might be a good idea.
No way I could do this "in house" for such a low cost.
For still more money, you can get duplex, a second tray, et cetera. I intend to purchase the postscript simm (about $30) which doubles the memory to only 8MB (sufficient for manuals, though) and provides PS level 2 emulation, to augment the PCL 5 that the printer normally speaks.
The laserjet 2100 is one of HP's finest black and white laser printers, and you can trivially find one with ethernet, or buy one and an ethernet EIO print server, for less than $300. They are not the fastest printers around but my 2100 will probably still be working when the last 1320 has failed :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Note: some very specialized printers are designed to allow page-flipping; so make sure that the printer documentation explicitly states so.
Read "some very specialized printers" as "almost any laser printer sold in the last ten years."
To be blunt, the way to tell if your manufacturer supports it is to ask them. Some very cheap, commercial-quality printers do this just fine. (The $150 Brother HL-1440 I use not only doesn't have a problem, but includeds a duplex printing mode in its drivers.)
Oh, and it's not @#$!ing "ink". It's "toner." Ink is a liquid, that, in "inkjets", permeates quite a bit deeper into the paper than tonor-flakes.
I needed a manual printed (perfect bound - like a paperback novel) last year and went with CafePress. They have reasonable prices--I think I spent $15 on a 200-page book, one copy. Decent quality, but the pages were a little yellow.
Then I found Lulu. Same kind of thing, with a base price of $4.53 per book and $0.02 per page. They do have a page limit of 700 pgs, which would translate into a whopping $18.53. Anyone have any experience with them?