Save The Trees And Keep Your Friends!

• What's the purpose of this page?
• Printing etiquette
• Efficient use of resources
• Programs related to printing
• How can I ... (summary of printing tips)

What's the purpose of this page? [Go to the top]

Printing Etiquette [Skip this section] [Go to the top]

Please remember that our printers are shared resources and try to be considerate in your use of the printer, so that you don't affect others too much in theirs. The following issues have been mentioned in the past as potential causes for irritation and annoyance:

• If there are other printouts on the printer, please do not put them on the desk in one stack, but spread them out so that other people can find their stuff. Also, if you happen to grab someone else's printout together with yours and you do not notice until you are in your office, please bring them back immediately. This will help avoid confusion and multiple printouts.

• If you have large print jobs, please print them out before or after regular business hours. There are more than 15 users per printer, so don't block the printers when other people are likely to need them as well. The best thing to do is to schedule large printjobs for sometime very late at night (e.g. after midnight) when most people are gone. This is how it works:

  • On a Macintosh:
    After you send the job to the printer, open the desktop printer control panel, highlight the job and then click on `pause'. After that click the clock icon and set up the time for printing. The job will be on hold until the time you specified.
    [This information was provided by Katya Shuldiner]

  • Under Unix,
    you can delay od schedule any job with the command at
    mymachine% at 3:00am
    at> lpr -Pps9b_d -h ManyPages.ps
    at>[Now press <CTRL>+<D> (which signals: End of file) You'll see something like:]
    at><EOT>
    job 23436274 at Mon Nov 17 3:00:00 1997
    When the job is done, you even get an email notification!
    [Credit for this one goes to Ulf Hermjakob]

• If you see the tide is low, please let someone know.
  Guess what: Paper and transparencies don't get replenished by themselves. There are people behind the curtain! If you notice that we are running out of printing materials, please let one of the project assistants know or be a nice neighbor and restock the materials yourself. They are available on the tenth floor (1046).

Efficient Use of Resources [Skip this section] [Go to the top]

• Printing double-sided
  Especially with large printjobs, consider printing your stuff double-sided. How does that work?
  Use any printer whose name ends in `_d' (e.g. ps9b_d instead of ps9b), and your job will be printed double-sided automatically. It can hardly be easier! Printing double-sided does not only save paper but also space in your shelf if you intend to keep your printout.

  You can also Change the default settings of your printer. The instructions given are for changing from double-sided to single sided, but it is quite obvious what you have to do to in order to get double-sided printing.

• Please be considerate in your use of the color printer. Printouts on the color printer are VERY EXPENSIVE and should be restricted to the very final version of your slides. The true artist works in black and white anyway ;-)

  Before you use the color printer the first time, you should make yourself acquainted with action's instructions for using the color printers.

• If your printjob doesn't come out, try to find out why before you send it off again. Maybe the printer is out of paper or jammed? Does the printer hang because it's stuck with a weird printjob by someone else? With
  lpq -P[printer]
  you can check the print queue for the printer. If the printer hangs with another printjob, try to get hold of the owner of that printjob and ask him or her to remove the respective job from the queue or to take care of the problem otherwise. Or you may direct your printjob to another printer AFTER REMOVING YOUR OLD ONE FROM THE QUEUE. You can remove any of your printjobs with the command
  lprm -P[printer] [job-No.]
  lpq will give you the job numbers of all current print jobs. (TIP: lpq is also a great way to find an available printer on the network when there's a lot of printing traffic ...)

• Copying is cheaper and faster than printing. A printer is no copy machine!

• If you are not sure as to whether to find header pages useful or not, you may want to consider trying to do without them. If you use the option '-h' with lpr (i.e. `lpr -P[printer] -h [file]'), the header page will be suppressed.

Programs Related to Printing [Skip this section] [Go to the top]

• First of all, lpr -P[printer] [-h] [file] sends a postscript file to the printer. Printer names are ps9a and ps9a_d on the south side, ps9b and ps9b_d on the north side, and ps9c, ps9c_d, ps9d, and ps9d_d on the west side. Use the printer names ending in _d if you want to print double-sided. The option -h suppresses the header page.
  ps9e is a color printer. Printouts on this printer are expensive, so use it only when you really need it and NEVER use it for drafts!

  Before you use the color printer the first time, you should make yourself acquainted with action's instructions for using the color printers.

• lpq and lprm are discussed in the section above.

• The program `ghostview' is a print preview program for postscript. Use it to check the layout of your document or take a look at something you just downloaded from the web before you print it - or maybe even decide that it isn't what you expected. Ghostview also lets you select single pages to print out - a great way to reprint that page the printer just crunched without having to print out the whole thing again.

• Another way to extract certain pages or ranges of pages from a postscript document into a new file is the program `psselect'. See the manpage (`man psselect') for details.

• A postscript manipulation program that leaves few wishes open is pstops. Pstops allows you to scale down and arrange postscript pages in many wonderful ways. Just a few highlights:
  You can ...
  • ... print postscript files in A4 format on letter size paper:
    pstops '1:0@.94(.925cm,.005cm)' [input-file] [output-file]
    
  • ... print two pages next to each other on one page in landscape mode (example for letter size paper):
    pstops '2:0L@.65(7.825in,0)+1L@.65(7.25in,5.5in)' [input-file] [output-file]
    
  • ... print four(!) pages on one (great for making a handout with your slides or a reference sheet with some documentation that you've always wanted to have handy) (example for letter size again):
    pstops '4:0@.5(0cm,13.97cm)+1@.5(10.795cm,13.97cm)+2@.5(0cm,0cm)+3@.5(10.795cm,0cm)' [input-file] [output-file]
    
  For more details, see the manpage (`man pstops')

• So what if it's a regular text file? There are several options The programs `enscript' and `a2ps' more ore less do the same job: they convert any text file into postscript and offer all kinds of fancy options: printing in two columns, choosing different fonts, printing two pages on one physical page by scaling the whole stuff down, including or excluding a page header with file name and time of printing and whatnot. For example,
  enscript -Pps9a_d -2rG boring.c
  will print the file boring.c in two columns (`-2') in landscape mode (`r') with a header in flashy style (`G' for gaudy) that helps you keeping header information and the actual text apart. In the example given, the stuff will be printed double-sided on printer ps9a (`-Pps9a_d'). The option -h (see lpr above) also works with enscript.
  enscript -pboring.ps -2rG boring.c
  will do the same thing but write the output into the file `boring.ps'. You can then check the layout with ghostview before you decide that it's actually not worth printing that file anyway ...
  See the manpage (`man enscript') for more fancy details. a2ps doesn't have a manpage, but the helpscreen should be informative enough (/opt/winter/bin/a2ps -help.)

• If you want more than two columns, `cnprint' may be the tool of choice. cnprint also is capable of printing Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters. I currently have it installed only locally, but I'll be happy to help anyone who is interested in it.
  There is also a program jprint for printing Japanese, but personally I advise to use cnprint, primarily because files produced with jprint cannot be viewed easily with ghostview (pagination information is lost).

How can I ... ? Tips'n'Tricks [Go to the top]

• ... check the print queue?
• ... cancel a print job?
• ... select a particular tray of the printer, e.g. for printing on special paper sizes?
  Believe it or not, this is the official on-the-fly advice from action: First of all, do it after hours, so that you have the print queue for yourself, or, in really, really, rare, urgent cases, ask action how to be a jerk and block the queue for everyone else. Then, place the special paper in one tray and remove or empty all other trays in the particular printer and send off the print job. The printer always checks all trays and uses the first one available. Since all other trays are empty or removed, it will take the only one left.
  When you're done, restore the printer to its original state.
• ... schedule a job for after hours?
• ... squeeze several postscript pages on one sheet of paper?
• ... view a postscript file without printing it?
• ... print only part of a postscript file?