No, you haven’t accidentally stumbled upon a technical manual for a heavy-duty printer. Scoring Notes is still your go-to source for information about music notation software and related technology.
But, printing is related technology, and yesterday, resolving a longstanding compulsion regarding printing margins was top of mind.
For quite a while, the image on pages printed to 18″ x 12″ paper on my Ricoh SP C842DN printer were off. Not by much, mind you — about 2 or 3 mm — the distance of a little more than one space on a regular-sized music staff. (What is a “space”, and how do you adjust its size? Glad you asked. And why does it matter? Glad you asked that, too.)
It meant that there was ever-so-slightly more margin on the top of the page, and ever-so-slightly less margin on the bottom of the page than intended, compared to the source document.
Everything was still perfectly readable and crisp, and I sometimes wondered if my eyes were just playing tricks on me, but I opened a file on my nice big Dell UltraSharp 32 4K U3225QE Thunderbolt hub monitor to the exact real-world dimensions – 9″ x 12″ (the 18″ x 12″ booklet folded over) and held up the same printed page to the screen, and, yep — suspicion confirmed:
So, now, what to do? Was it causing me lost sleep? Um… do I need to admit it?
I ended up working the problem. When there is a will, there’s a way.
Behold! My documented steps for Calibrating the Side-to-Side Registration on a RICOH SP C842dn:
- Remove the side access panel
- Enter service mode by holding the bottom side button A (covered by the access panel), and the Check Status button simultaneously
- Press “Reset” then enter the code 806182, and then hold C for several seconds (The original YouTube video from FotoCeramic with groovy underscoring — and 44,000 views — that helped tremendously)
- Go into System SP
- Choose SP-1XXX (Feed)
- Choose SP-1002 Side-to-Side Registration
- Choose Paper Tray 3
- Use the ./* key to enter a minus sign (if needed), then type the desired value
- Use the # key to save the value
- Exit and replace the access panel
- Repeat for other trays
I am not making this up. Someone at Ricoh wanted to made it harder than a Nintendo cheat code to change this setting. But it worked!
Two legends that I interviewed in the early days of the Scoring Notes podcast, Emily Grishman and Katie Wardrobe, both emphasized the importance of documenting their workflow — and workarounds — for the sake of their future selves, when an issue arises at the most inopportune time. This little gem of advice has, no doubt, been a key to their success. I wish I could say I’ve followed their advice 100% of the time, but I try to do so whenever I can — and, more often than not, share my findings on Scoring Notes, to save others a bit of hassle.
Is this post, and my video somewhat tongue-in-cheek? Yes. You probably don’t have a Ricoh SP C842DN (or C840DN) nearby, but with 44,000 views of the FotoCeramic video, it appears that more than a few people do have this printer and are searching for solutions. So, hopefully, the search bots will pick up this post and help someone else with this issue, and welcome a few more friends into our Scoring Notes audience.
The larger lessons though, are twofold.
First: if you take the time to troubleshoot a problem, and find a solution, whether it’s in Dorico, MuseScore, Fender Notion, Sibelius, Finale, or any one of the other applications or tools you use, spend a few minutes noting it for the future.
Second: If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
I hope you enjoyed this little diversion into the minutiae of the life of the music printing service at NYC Music Services. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.
Very nice statement of principles, Philip!.
Personally, every time I do something that I may only do, say, once a year, I write up a Procedure document, and print it and put it in a big fat indexed paper folder. Now the next time I need to make buttons for a Folk Harp Retreat, I will look it up.
I have the same approach to documenting plugins. I try to explain to myself how it works and what can be tricky, and write a document about it. I usually put them up on my website, where there are probably 100 of such documents.
Sometimes I get a question about a plugin I wrote 10 years ago, and I am always glad to see such a document.
Bob,
I’m very glad to see such a document as well! You are definitely included in the “legends” club along with Emily and Katie.
Not only margin, but only the first staff appears to be microscopically condensed to my eye. Did the hack fix that as well?
That’s an optical illusion — the image size was not affected.