The most important tip

Make FinePrint your default printer. You can do this when you install FinePrint or at any time by going into Windows Control Panel and selecting DEVICES and PRINTERS. Right mouse click on FinePrint and select SET AS DEFAULT PRINTER.
You will get these benefits:

• You will see everything you print in the FinePrint preview. It is surprising how often this prevents printing something you would later scrap because the margins where wrong or not everything appears on the page where it should etc.
• You become more familiar with the FinePrint controls and more likely to use the paper saving features such as booklet duplex or multi-up.
• FinePrint logs the pages you sent to it and the sheets of paper used. By sending everything via FinePrint you get a comprehensive record of your paper saving.

Paper saving

Just using FinePrint should save paper, as the preview screen reduces printed pages that don't appear as you expect.
Paper saving options are:

• Booklet output - which can reduce your paper consumption by 75% in comparison to single sided printing.
• Double-sided printing
• Multi-up printing. Pictures and power point presentation printouts are partcularly suited to this. You can have 2,4 or 8 pages on a sheet.
• Combining documents. By combining documents you can remove blank pages. Printing two separate single page documents to FinePrint allows you to utilize the 2- up setting efficiently. The same happens if you combine bigger documents and print as booklets. Fewer blank pages are necessary to produce the even number of pages required in a booklet.
• Use the OVERLAY feature. This will remove the need for preprinted stationery, which as well as being costly is often scrapped before it is finished due to changing requirements. You also remove waste that occurs through printing to plain paper when requiring letterhead and vice-versa. You can save any pages you want to use as overlays. If you have a letterhead design print it to FinePrint and save it as an Overlay by clicking SETTINGS and selecting OVERLAY.

Ink and toner saving

Whenever you print multi-up or booklet layout the image is smaller and less ink/toner is used. There are also two options that directly reduce consumption.

• Remove graphics. This removes all the graphics without changing the document layout in any way. As well as saving ink it can speed up printing. Web pages in particular can contain ads and not graphics that are essential to the sense of the document.
• Grayscale. This can reduce the consumption of coloured ink and can improve legibility as some light colours are not very readable when printed.

Improving document appearance and auditability

Overlays

These can replace letterhead and other preprinted forms. They present an opportunity to improve the appearance of your documents by using carefully designed overlays rather than ad hoc created ones. This also applies to using overlays for text such as on headers and footers. The removal of preprinted stationery costs make it affordable to use overlays to improve appearance in areas where preprinted stationery would have been desirable but too expensive.

Stamps

• Add headers and footers or as a watermarks and select either left or right justified or centred. You also have full control of font type, size and colour. You can save sets of headers and footers for different types of document to both. This can save having to enter them each time and will also ensure consistency if lots of staff are sending out similar documents. You can even set up multiple FinePrinters each with a separate set of settings already defined. Just give each printer a suitably meaningful name.
  Typical uses to improve documents are:
• Automatic page numbering. For example you can select the option page x of y. When applied to a complex printout comprising several separate documents the printout has a unique page number on each page and the total pages in the document. This is the type of information need for document quality control purposes. The Bates numbering option further enhances this by letting you specify a fixed number of characters width where the unused positions are populated with zeroes to confirm there use/non use.
• Adding variable information. Page numbers are added by selecting the predefined variable called 'Page' which then numbers the pages sequentially. There are other variables such as date and time, user name, job name, computer name, printer name