Why Paper Jams Persist (2018)

Printing is an odd business. My grandmother was a typographer -- a layout artist, in the days before desktop publishing -- and had a unique combination of artistic skills and highly technical ones. The fundamental tension between those two aspects, together with an ever-present focus on minimising cost, makes for a cut-throat marketplace of multi-domain experts. It's an art we should celebrate. I took great pleasure in printing my PhD thesis, and the person who did the book binding both noticed and appreciated it, and as a result used machines and processes developed in the late 19th century to artistically produce the 10 hardback copies I had to have made. It's a wonderful mix of craft and care and I think a very misunderstood industry.

[DRM'd inkjet printers can go screw themselves, however]

Many years ago I worked on a small 14 ppm machine that was intended for worldwide distribution. We spent considerable time testing in "hot/wet" environmental chambers because in Brazil, where Xerox had a large factory and sold domestically, people would set up copiers on the sidewalk and sell copying to passersby. Damp paper is very different than dry paper and we had to be robust against it.

Out of the middle of nowhere we suddenly started getting jams on the machines. It was like an infection.

Turns out that some genius decided they'd save the company money (which it didn't need to do, it was rolling in dough) by switching to a cheaper paper. The new stuff ended up in the machines around the building in a seemingly random order.

Xerox sent a tech out. He inspected and cleaned some rollers, then concluded that our paper sucked. Proved it by printing ~500 pages on good paper he'd brought, and then using a ream of the old paper.

If your laser printer is mis-feeding or jamming a lot, buy better paper.

Also, humidity can be important. We had a "proof printer" room where the expensive color printers were that generated the actual "proofs" before stuff went off to get printed by the thousands-to-millions or shown to clients, and there was a household humidifier in the corner to keep things from getting too dry in the winter.

Also had to chuckle, even though it is not the same thing, because it reminded me of the first time I experienced a paper avalanche. Several years into my adult life, somehow unprocessed papers and bills had stacked up so high that they went sliding into an avalanche, burying other stuff beneath them. It somehow felt like a milestone in life.

My 2 least favorite things about computers: fonts and printing. Even in 2021, printing still sucks. Sure, we've decided we want to print on so many different types of printing surfaces, that modern printer manufactures probably dream of the days only printing on white paper. Makes me wish for a laser printer with an option to use dot matrix fan folded style paper feed. At least you know it's going to pull straight.