Printing Home

Faculty and Staff Printing

Swarthmore has a contract with Canon for departmental printing.  For more information about acquiring departmental printers, see the Sustainable Printer Purchasing Policy.  

For instructions on how to add a specific departmental printer, see Instructions for Departmental Printers.   

Student Printing

Printers are available in public computing areas and in the dorms for student use. There is no charge for printing but we ask students to refrain from printing multiple copies or wasting paper. Large print jobs for student organizations should be referred to Print Services. 

For instructions on how to add a specific public or dorm printer, see Instructions for Student Printers.

Working with OCR

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a technology that enables you to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera into editable and searchable data. Copiers installed by ITS at Swarthmore default to OCR.

However, if you need to execute OCR, you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert the material.

  1. Open document in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

  2. Open the Tools tab.

  3. Select Scan & OCR.

  4. Select Recognize Text.

  5. Choose the relevant settings, such as language.

  6. Click on the Recognize Text button.

For more details on this, explore Adobe’s How to scan and get text from an image with OCR article.

Media Center Printing

Color and Poster printing for academic purposes is available in the Beardsley Media Center.