Several network printers are available at SISSA:
printer name | location | |
pst | ground floor | |
ps12 | 1st floor | |
pscc | 1st floor | color printer |
ps22 | 2nd floor | |
psc | 2nd floor | color printer |
psnb1 | «new» building | |
psnb2 | «new» building | |
psnb3 | «new» building |
Every workstation has a default printer, which is usually the closest one. When printing from some graphical application you have usually to find a Print command, probably available inside the File menu.
You can use the lpr command to print from the command line (in fact, most «FilePrint» interfaces just put somewhere a temporary file and invoke lpr onto it). Please be sure to feed lpr with text or Postscript files only. Text files can be converted to postscript with a2ps. You can print to a specific printer with the -P switch, e.g. lpr -Ppsc somefile.ps will print somefile.ps on the color printer at 2nd floor. Please use color printers for color jobs only.
Once you issued the lpr or FilePrint command, your job is sent to the print spooler and possibly queued after other jobs previously sent to the same printer by other users (or by yourself). You can then examine the print queue to see if your job gets printed or to remove it. This can be done with the lpq command (with the same -Pprinter switch you used for lpr) or via the web interface. Command-line removal of a job in the printing queue is done with the lprm command.
lpr -Pps12 somefile.ps | send somefile.ps to 1st floor printer |
lpq -Pps12 | show 1st floor printer queue |
Printer: ps12@spooler ... | |
... | (this is the output of lpq) |
Rank Owner/ID ... | |
1 your name@some host+951 ... | your job has been assigned number 951 |
lprm -Pps12 951 | remove it |
Please note that all printers at SISSA use A4 paper, and can occasionally get stuck if a job that uses a different paper size (e.g. letter) is submitted.
Many more printing options are available using the xpp command on shannon.
a2ps is a quite complex program, despite the fact it is mostly used only to convert plain text to (possibly multi-column) postscript. It provides many other features, such as syntax highlighting and specialized processing for many common text formats. There is a small manual available with a2ps -help or man a2ps and a much larger one with info a2ps. System settings for a2ps are defined in /etc/a2ps.cfg and /etc/a2ps-site.cfg. Most of them can be customized by the user, writing appropriate definitions in the file ~/.a2ps/a2psrc.
Some printing guidelines:
In order to prevent abuses, every print job is recorded in a central database as soon as it is printed. Recorded data are not available to users, please do not ask for them.