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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 1 of 11

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H OM E PR I N T IN G T I PS - H OW TO
CA LCU LA T E P R IN T C O VE R A G E A N D
CO ST

MONDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2007 STUFF WE'LL NEED

How to Work Out Printing Costs A Free PDF Writer


APFill 30 Day Trial
How To Work Out Ink or Toner Coverage and
Printing Costs AFPL Ghostscript (free utility)

I run a small computer business and one of the questions I am very


DOWNLOADABLE VERSION
often asked by customers who have purchased printers is “Is there
any way to figure out how much ink is needed to print a document”. ** New 21st September **
Whether it’s printing a simple document for a family friend, a church To download a PDF version of this
newsletter or printing on a “semi-professional” basis, it would be guide (which you may freely
distribute to your friend, family or
very useful to know the cost of printing a document.
mailing list), click on the link below.

After being asked by a customer who had just bought a laser printer
Download PDF
and was approached by a local group requesting he provide them
** New 21st September **
with a cost for printing 2,000 leaflets, I set out to find out just how to
accurately calculate printing costs before the ink (or toner) even hits
the page, so here goes.

Print Tool -
The following guide is suitable for both inkjet and laser printers and Download
assumes that you have a basic knowledge of how to download and Save paper, ink and
money. Windows
install applications from the internet. software. Download
now!
www.FinePrint.com
First of all, we’re going to need a few tools:
Print Management
Software
A (free) PDF Writer Easy to install
If you don’t already have one, you’ll need a PDF writer, a great (and software to monitor
and quota printing.
completely free) one is PrimoPDF (Go to www.primopdf.com and
Free Trial!
click on the “Download Now” button). Install this application (very www.papercut.com

straightforward, Next, Next, Next type of thing)


Toner dust suction
booths
Designed for recycling
of printer and copier
cartridges
www.montes.it

Printer's Repair
Parts
Discount parts and
accessories for
industrial printing
machines.

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 2 of 11

AVPSoft’s APFill
I looked through a few coverage calculators and this is without a
doubt the best and easiest to use. This tutorial uses the 30 day free
trial of APFill, which if you’re doing this purely for interest or for a
one-off project will be fine. If you’re printing regularly or semi-
professionally then I would certainly consider buying the
Home/Professional version of this product.

To get the free 30 trial of APFill, go to AVPSoft’s Home Page


(www.avpsoft.com) and click on “Download” next to the APFill Ink
Coverage Meter image then install the application (again, very
straightforward).

AFPL Ghostscript
This free (open source) utility allows APFill to calculate print
coverage from a PDF file. Click Here to download and install it (Run
the setup program, Click on “Setup”, then click on “Install”)

Note: Although APFill can try and figure out ink/toner coverage from
a screenshot, to be quite honest, it is so widely inaccurate as to be
almost useless (With most applications, the “prettied up” version of
the document you see on the screen is often widely different in terms

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 3 of 11

of print coverage that the actual printed document is), therefore


only ever use the coverage calculated from a PDF.

Now we have everything we need!

First, open up the document you’re going to print, in this case we’re
going to use an A4 size Publisher file, but the same principle applies
for anything.

Print the document to a PDF file (just as you would normally


print, but instead of selecting your printer, choose the PDF Writer
Printer), for this example we’ll use our PrimoPDF application.

**********
CORRECTION 5th August, 2009: In order to give accurate
results, please ensure your application prints CMYK and not
Composite RGB. In this example, to give the correct results click
on "Advanced Print Settings" in Publisher and choose "Composite

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 4 of 11

CMYK" from "Output" dropdown.


**********

For PrimoPDF, change the “PDF Settings” from “Screen” to “Print”


and change the “Save As”, to point to somewhere you can find the
PDF file (in this case the Desktop).

Click on OK

Now we have our document in PDF format, ain’t it pretty!

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 5 of 11

Close Acrobat Reader.

Start APFill by clicking on the Start Menu, Programs, APFill


Ink&Toner Coverage Meter, APFill Ink Coverage Meter

Tick the box that says “Don’t display this window at


startup”, then click on the big long “OK” button.

You’ll now see the APFill icon down in the system tray.

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 6 of 11

Right click on the icon (shown by the green arrow above).

The first time you do this, you’ll be shown a registration screen:

Click on “Continue without registration”

A small menu will pop-up, left click on the top


option “Coverage ratio CMYK+RGH (PS,PDF)”

At this point a “Open” dialog box will appear.

(C ) CO PY RI GH T 200 7 H O MEP RI NT I N GT IP S

Digg

submit

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Find where you saved the PDF file in the previous steps and
click on the “Open” button

A “Confirm” dialog box will appear, click on the “Yes” button

The main APFill windows will now appear:

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Click on the “Calculate” button to calculate the ink/toner


coverage for this page (if doing multiple pages you can click
on “Calculate all pages”.

Let APFill do it’s stuff, which may take a few seconds.

The “Results…” dialog box will then appear:

Click on the “CMYK Density” tab (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow,


BlacK).

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And there we have it, our page when printed out will
consist of:

30.01% Cyan
44.31% Magenta
34.08% Yellow
0% Black

CORRECTION 5th August, 2009: Please see correction


above (regarding CMYK output rather than RGB) in order
to give accurate results.

From there it’s a simple procedure to calculate the actual cost (in
ink/toner) for your particular printer.

For example, let’s look at the Cyan figure.

Check out the specification for your ink/toner cartridge (very often
you’ll find this on the manufacturer’s website).

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 10 of 11

In our case, a HP Colour Laserjet 3600 Cyan Toner Cartridge

So, for our £78 UK Pounds, we’ll get 4,000 pages at 5% coverage.
From out APFill Results page, we can see that the coverage of Cyan is
about 30%.

30 divided by 5 = 6

So, as we’ll get 4,000 pages at 5% coverage and we’re on 30%


coverage... we’ll therefore get 6 times fewer pages from our toner
cartridge than the manufacturer’s quoted life, i.e

4,000 pages divided by 6 = 666.67 pages (per cartridge)

Our cartridge costs £78 UK pounds.

We now know we’re going to get 666.67 pages from this cartridge.

78 divided by 666.67 = 0.116

So each page we print will cost us 11.6 pence per page in Cyan toner.

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Home Printing Tips - How To Calculate Print Coverage and Cost Page 11 of 11

Repeat the above steps for each of the other colours and we have our
final total…

Cyan – 11.6 pence per page


Magenta – 17.29 pence per page
Yellow – 13.29 pence per page
Black – 0 pence per page

Total – 42.18 pence per page!

And there we have it. We’ve figured out the cost of printing a page...
and without a drop of ink or toner hitting the page!

To go back to AVPSoft's APFill Page click the link below


http://avpsoft.com/products/apfill/

POSTED BY JOHN HAMILTON AT 05:32 0 COMMENTS


LABELS: CALCULATE PRINT COVERAGE, INK COVERAGE, PRINT COSTS,
TONER COVERAGE

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