6. Using printers

6.1 Printing and managing print queues

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 «File$\rightarrow$Print» 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 File$\rightarrow$Print 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

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.

6.2 Printing policy

Some printing guidelines:

1. do not use color printers for black-and-white only jobs
2. if you need many copies of the same document, please use photocopiers instead of printers
3. whenever appropriate use duplex printing^6.1
4. whenever appropriate use a2ps to convert plain text to postscript: it will produce a more compact output, and will add some useful syntax highlighting to many programming languages
5. if your job doesn't get printed, check the print queue before re-submitting it: it may have produced some error to the printer, or it may have been queued after some other job
6. if the printer becomes «confused» and starts printing hundreds of pages of junk, interrupt the job - this usually happens when the printer is fed with input of unknown format and can result in a thousand sheets of paper wasted and the print queue blocked for hours

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.

Footnotes

... printing^6.1

this is the default for all black and white printers