There are several printers in the School of Maths. At the time of writing this help (Tue Apr 6 17:42:29 GMT+0530 2004), these are the printers, and facilities in each, available:
If you want to know what printers are available type the following command:
/usr/sbin/lpc status | grep ^[a-z]
All printers in common areas "understand" DVI, PS and PDF files, so you can print them directly (the machine that queues the jobs will do the necessary conversions). You can do that with a command of the type
lpr -Pprinter-name filewhere printer-name is one of the names in the above list.
You can also use the prtmgr program; this is menu driven, it will
ask you several questions (printer, what type of file, what type of
printout) and finally send the job to the printer. A typical screen of
the prtmgr looks like this:
These two commands are used to see the queue and remove jobs from printers. However, given the way the printers are in our system, these commands do not give any information. The only case where you might want to use them is when a printer is not working and you have sent a job to it. To remove the job from the queue, first find out the jobs with
lpq -Pprinter-nameYour job(s) will appear, together with some queue number(s). Remove the jobs by the number with a command like the following:
lprm -Pprinter-name job-numberThese commands are better executed in the machine called printserver (that is an alias for the machine in charge of the queue).
Although the printers can handle all sort of files, essentially they just print PostScript (PS) files. So it is good to know some of the things you can do with PS files, before sending them to the printer. Some of these utilities are incorporated in the prtmgr; others will be new. Here is a (partial) list of things you can do.
psselect -p1,2,5-10 file.ps file2.psTo print it directly, rather than saving the selected pages, do
psselect -p1,2,5-10 file.ps | lpr -Pprinter-name
psbook file.ps file2.ps
pstops 2:-0 file.ps file2.ps
pstops -pa4 file.ps file2.ps
a2ps -r -2 -j --no-header -i -o file.ps file
psmerge -oout.ps file1.ps file2.ps .... filen.ps
Look at the Print HOWTO file.