Students, faculty, and staff can skip the trip to a copy center for their next printing job.

Interactive NowPrint software on the ISU Printing Services Web site lets users at any computer upload their documents, preview them and even select delivery and payment options, said Robert Louden, computer publishing specialist for ISU Printing Services.

All copy center paper and binding options are available through the NowPrint Web site, www.print.iastate.edu, Louden said.

Customers can choose to have their documents delivered on the ISU Printing Services delivery route or go to a copy center to pick up their order, said James Barnd, system supervisor specialist for ISU Printing Services.

Customers can also choose to receive documents through campus mail, the U.S. Postal Service or UPS. Payment options include purchase orders, CyCash or cash at pick up, Barnd said.

“This can be a time-saver,” Barnd said. “I [can] have a job submitted in two or three minutes.”

In the past, customers with computers connected to network printers could send their document to print, then call the copy center to place their order. After that, they could go to the copy center to proof the document, Louden said.

The new system allows immediate feedback. Users can proof images of their document right after the document is uploaded to make sure fonts and graphics were uploaded correctly.

“It just assures them that their job is going to turn out the way they want it,” Barnd said.

People will still have the option to come in and look at a hard copy of their document, he said.

Louden said he expects most customers to proof their documents online.

For example, a student could submit a thesis to ISU Printing Services in the middle of the night.

“You can order the whole thing at 3 o’clock in the morning, go to bed, and walk in the next day and pick it up,” Louden said.

Renea Miller, clerk in sociology, said she uses the new service because jobs submitted using NowPrint have a quick turnaround time. Instead of dropping documents off in a departmental office or walking them over to a copy center, she submits them online.

One job involving 300 copies of a booklet was completed in less than six hours, Miller said. The other job, which involved 800 copies of a technical report, took about 24 hours.

People are starting to prefer purchasing many goods and services online, Louden said.

“[With] any progressive business, they’re looking at Web-based business,” he said. “The more progressive universities are starting to jump on this bandwagon. It is kind of inevitable.”

Printing Services has received about two or three online jobs a day since introducing the service at the beginning of the school year, Barnd said.

“I assume that it’ll pick up once people know it’s out there,” Barnd said. “We hoped that it would bring in more from students. Our big focus was to attract the Web-savvy students.”

Online submission is currently best suited for Microsoft Office documents, Louden said. The software company that sells NowPrint is working to update the software so it can accept documents in more applications, Louden said.

Until then, customers like Miller, who uses PageMaker 7.0, will have to convert their documents to PDF, or portable document format, files.

“That’s just a minor issue, as far as I’m concerned,” Miller said.

In addition to the main plant, which is north of Molecular Biology, ISU Printing Services has six locations around campus, Barnd said. There are copy centers located at Curtiss Hall, Design Hall, the Hub, the Memorial Union, the Scheman Conference Center and the Union Drive Association.

The main plant does all offset printing — jobs of 500 to 1,000 copies that are more economical to print on a printing press, Louden said.

Customers can use the online service to send their documents to the main plant or the Memorial Union, he said. Later this fall, they will be able to submit online jobs to the copy center in the Union Drive Association Community Center, he said.