Printing Guide

Printing in the Department

The department currently maintains a number of printers: public as well as private. Most public printers are available for external non-Linux printing. To print from a Linux workstation, you can use the following commands:

  • qtcups: This will start a graphical interface that will let you configure your default printer and set various options. You may specify a .ps or .txt file as a parameter to this command, for example:  qtcups /usr/share/ghostscript/*.*/examples/tiger.ps 
  • kprinter: If you are using KDE, this is preferred over qtcups. You can use command-line parameters with this command as well.
  • lpr: LPR is the command-line utility that allows printing without the use of graphical interfaces. See " man lpr " for more information about available options.

You should also be familiar with the following commands:

  • dvips: DVIPS is part of the teTeX text processing package. It converts DVI documents into postscipt and can optionally spool them to the printer.
  • pdf2ps: A similar command that will convert PDF documents to Postscript.
  • a2ps: a2ps provides a method for printing multiple pages of postscript or text onto a single page. See " man a2ps " for complete documentation.

 

General Instructions for External Printing

If you are using Windows or Mac OSX, you can use the following instructions to set up your printer: