Monday, March 3, 2008

Canon iR C4080i: Disappearing settings

The Canon iR C4080i is making me pull my hair and knock my head in the wall. Because while the settings are good on the server, they keep reseting on the client machines every time they log off and back on. But strangely, not for everyone.

First, I noticed that the settings are NOT inherited from the server. Or rather, they are inherited from the server, but only the factory preset settings are copied, not the ones I put in. This includes an annoying tendency for Internet Explorer to print in Letter format rather than A4, and with 50 people not knowing how to remove a job that is blocking the print queue, it becomes a support nightmare.

Since I can not modify the default profile, my first attempt at correcting this was by adding a new profile. There are actually two locations to do this. If you add it in Properties / General / Printing Preferences, the new profile remains local. However, if you add it in Properties / Profiles, the new profile not only copies itself to client machines upon logon, but immediately! That's a nice touch, if it was not for the following problems.

First, the clients don't automatically select the new profile. Indeed, you still need to go to each client (translating to Windows profiles, not physical computers) and manually select the correct profile both in Properties/General/Printing Preferences and in Properties/Profiles. When logging off, this information will be stored for some of the clients. I have not figured out when it stores the information and when it doesn't. I'll keep working on that.

Next, it turns out that the information copied from the server does not include the checkboxes for cropping fonts and using printer fonts. Both of these boxes are still checked on the client machine, despite these being unchecked in the printing profile stored on the server.

And to make matters worse, the new default profile is not stored when you log off. When you log back on, the driver goes back the the factory default standard profile instead of yours. I will keep working on this problems, because it just has to be fixed.

1 comment:

GazG said...

I'm having the same problem with a Canon MF5700 Multifunction Printer. I have to manually keep changing it from Letter 8"x11" to A4 paper.

It is deployed via Group Policy, and whilst all the settings are fine on the server, the clients all have Letter as their default profile's page size. This only occurs in the Canon driver's "Profile" tab - the standard Windows print settings are all A4, but this does not affect it and it keeps trying to print Letter.

If you found a fix I would be very keen to know it.