SFINX software tree - printing

Printers

At the moment, there are three public laser printers (hp5 in the middle room on the 5th floor, hp6 just outside room 608 and hp7 in the workstation room on the 7th floor).

Then, there are a number of printers which belong to one of the working groups: novahp (NOVA group, outside room 708), chemhp (Astrochemistry group, outside room 505), cosmoshp (Cosmos group, in room 604), secr (Secretariat, room 622), and a few private printers: ewine_desk, tim_desk, harm_desk.

Most of those printers are HP LaserJet 4. All of them understand PostScript.

And there is a color printer (Tektronix Phaser PX, also a PostScript printer). This one is a bit shaky and has lots of paper jams. Just insert the paper gently, and help it on its way in. This will make you think about whether you really wanted to make a color print... those things are expensive (approx. Dfl 2,- for paper, Dfl 5,- for viewgraph).

An up-to-date list of all printers can be obtained by typing the command printers.

Default printer

On every computer at the Observatory, hp (or lp, which is an alias) refers to the default printer on that system, which is either the printer of the cluster to which this machine belongs, or the printer closest to the console.

Set the environment variable PRINTER to the name of another printer if you want to change the default. You can of course include this in .settings or .cshrc.

Sometimes the default printer on a system is not really the one closest to you (e.g. your X-terminal is located in 511, but your session runs on vecht, on the 7th floor, making hp7 the system default. One way around this is the command getscreen -printer, which tries to figure our behind which screen you are sitting, and what the nearest printer is. You could therefore include in .login: 

  setenv PRINTER `getscreen -printer`
  echo "Default printer is '$PRINTER'"

Print commands

The standard UNIX command to send something to the printer is lpr. This will take care of text to PostScript conversion, if necessary.

Other standard commands such as lpq to view the queue and lprm to remove a job from the queue are also available.

However, a specific user-friendly programs exist that might suit your needs better: print, which uses a paper-saving layout for text files; it can also print many other types of files directly.

Tips

Printing large files

Large files (> 3 MByte) may sometimes cause problems; they have to be copied into the spooling area, and if there is not enough space, the job will not print properly. There are two possible solutions:
  1. Split a multi-page document into smaller parts that will print easily. This can be done in ghostview by selecting a set of pages, and then selecting the "save marked pages" option. Another way to accomplish this is to use the pstops command.
    If the file is originally a TeX-file, you can give dvips options to print only part of the file at once.
  2. If that cannot be done, print the PostScript document using lpr -s filename on the machine that serves the printer of your choice. This is strw for hp5 and vecht for hp7. The subcluster printers are served by the subcluster server (deuterium for chemhp and ewine_desk; elrond for novahp and tim_desk; reusel for cosmoshp). The sysadm printer is served by fluor, and the color printer by dollard (but that will probably not be helpful for this purpose).
David.Jansen@strw.leidenuniv.nl
Last modified: Tue Oct 29 16:40:14 MET 1996