Jan 23, 2018
Here at Sobs we do not condone or encourage the use of printed notices and the significant waste of paper caused by their printing. We do encourage the use of electronic delivery.
We do understand however that any system requires a transition period, and therefore the managed migration of school notices from paper to electronic systems is a factor and we do need to support this. Therefore we do support printed notices and this article describes a number of the options we provide to encourage better use of paper.
Year levels and Categories
Notices are organised into year levels and then categories within each year level. If a notice spans 2 or more year levels it is included in a section terms ‘All year levels’ although to be accurate this should be called ‘Mixed year levels’. Besides year levels there is one additional grouping called ‘Staff’.
There are two major layout options with regard to year levels and categories.
- Printing the year levels and categories in the first column This option sets aside the first column of the print out for the year levels and categories to be printed. The width of this column can be defined as a percentage of the entire page width, the default is 20%. If you set the page width to 0% then the second option comes into play.
- Printing the year levels and categories in the first row. The year levels and categories only print when there is a year level or category break (or change). When that change occurs the year level and category will print on a single line across the page. The notices for this year level and category will follow on the next line.
You can also choose to only print the year levels (and not the categories).
All of these options are set in the School Settings on the WAZ tab.
Staff / Contributor identification
The staff member that enters the notice is another piece of useful information, particular when there is a need for additional questions or clarification. By default the staff member is identified by their short-code as the last column on each notice line.
There is an option to disable the staff short-code from appearing on the printed notices. This option can be set in the School Settings on the WAZ tab.
Overall notice print size
When notices are entered some staff may have access to a style entry box that allows them to specify font sizes, styles and colours. Other staff may only have access to a plain text box entry. For those plain text entries it is possible for the Sobs administrator to configure a font size that overrides the default.
In the School Settings page on the WAZ tab there is an entry for ‘Print font size’. This value is a percentage that is applied to the printed notices. By default the value is 100% which means the font size is 100% of it’s current value, or in order words, unaffected.
If you specify a value of 150% then the printed notices will be 1.5x larger than normal.
If you specify a value of 50% then the printed notices will be 0.5x smaller than normal.
This setting however does not necessarily control those notices entered using the styled entry box.
Web browsers and Printers
Other factors affecting the size of the printed notices. Your web browser has a number of print settings that will also control the printing of notices – for example the orientation (portrait or landscape) can be set by the web browser print dialog. Similarly some web browsers now come with a ‘scale to fit’ option allowing the web page to automatically scale to fit the paper used in the printer.
Printers can also be effective in saving paper – such as printers with the option to print double-sided. Your printer may have options for printing draft quality which may help save toner etc.