How to print

Under construction

Contents

BW, 1 sided
BW, 2 sided
BW transparency
Colour, 1 sided
Colour, 2 sided
Colour transparency

This document presents the various options for printing material available to the Astronomy Group at Institute for Physics and Astronomy.

In the Atlas Room (520-230) three printers are located. They are all postscript and network printers. Two of them have web servers, that can tell the status of each printer and which can be used for defining the standard operation. The list is

The HP 1600CM is out of operation at the moment.

In the corridor on the 2. floor you will find a black and white Laser printer Model HP 4plus and a similar printer is situated in the PC Bar on the 2. floor. They are both black and white printers printing on one side only with a resolution of 600x600 dpi.

Finally there are possibilities to print large formats and large volumes in black and white in the printshop on the 3. floor. This will be described later.

Printing A4 materials

Next you will find descriptions for each category of print that you want. The choice is between one- or two-sided prints, paper or transparency etc. Several possibilities are mentioned so that you have some redundancy in case of failures, lack of supplies or other reasons for not being able to print on a particular printer. The best option is the first in the list.

Black and white, single sided (simplex)

  1. The simplest solution is to print on the printer in the corridor

    lpr -Pps02 file.ps
  2. To print on the 'hpnew' printer you must run the filter hpfilter:

    cat file.ps | hpfilter -d OFF -o UPPER | lpr -Phpnew
  3. On the HP computers the print command used is

    dd -dps02 file.ps

Black and white, two sided (duplex)

  1. Standard printing is two sided. On all SGI/Linux systems print using

    lpr -Phpnew file.ps
  2. On the HP computers use the command

    dd -dhpnew file.ps
  3. In emergency cases only, you can use the colour printer 'phaser' and print by

    lpr -Phpcol file.ps

Black and white transparencies

  1. The Laser printer must be used in simplex mode and with manual feed. This is ensured by running the file through the hpfilter filter:

    cat file.ps | hpfilter -d OFF -o LOWER | lpr -Phpnew

    Insert the correct transparency sheet for black and white in the manual feed on the front of the printer one by one.

Colour printing, one sided

  1. This can be done with a special print program only available on the servers: origo, bigcat, tuc47 or ocen.

    xprint -dphaser1 file.ps

    A graphical window will pop up, where you normally only have to click print, but also have the option to modify the way the file is being printed.
    By including the switch -n in the xprint command, the window can be avoided.

  2. In the print shop you can print on a large printer

    lpr -Po2 file.ps

Colour print, two sided

  1. The standard mode to print on the PHASER 8200DP printer is to use the xprint program:

    xprint -dphaser2 file.ps
  2. One can in addition use the lpr program:

    lpr -Phpcol file.ps

Colour transparencies

  1. The standard solution is to print with the command xprint:

    xprint -dphasert file.ps

    and feed the printer from the front with the proper transparency sheet for the Phaser printer, located on the shelf normally. You need to set the switch on the paper drawer to transparency. Remember to put it back to paper, when you are done.

  2. The printshop also allows for transparencies, but then a filter must be used to make the printer select the transparency tray. Print from the origo server with:

    do.transp file.ps
    lpr -Po2 overhead.ps

Large format printing

The workshop has possibilites to print in large format. This is useful when producing posters, which can be printed in A0 or A1 format, ready to be posted on poster boards. I personally find A0 clumsy to transport and would recommend A1 (one or two sheets).

  1. Print in A3 format can be done via 'origo' with the commands:

    do.A3 file.ps
    lpr -Po2 A3.ps

Then go to the printshop and pick up your copy.

A special set of LaTeX style files exist, that will setup the text for such a poster. This makes it especially easy to produce the proceedings afterwards. A copy of these files are situated in the directory origo:~srf/tex/poster.

Advice on printing large formats can be obtained from Kurt Marcussen (3790) and Søren Frandsen (3612).

Special print programs

hpfilter

This filter adds the relevant HP-PJL syntax for driving full duplex printers.

------------------------------------------------
| Option | Parameter | Values |------------------------------------------------
| -d | duplex | {ON|OFF}
| -b | binding | {LONGEDGE|SHORTEDGE}
| -o | outbin | {UPPER|LOWER} |------------------------------------------------

e.g.:

  hpfilter -d OFF -b LONGEDGE -o LOWER < foo.ps | lpr -Phpnew

to print a transparency feeding this from the manual paper feed.

-d OFF ---> print on one side of the paper only

-o LOWER ---> print from tray 1 = transparencies or other special formats

-o UPPER ---> print from tray 2 = normal paper

xprint

This is a special Xerox program to print on the Xerox Phaser printer (and other XZerox machines). It is installed on the servers 'origo', 'bigcat', 'ocen' and 'tuc47.

Usage:

xprint -dphaser file.ps

where three printer queues have been defined

The program brings up a window, where it is possible to modify a range of printer options available on the printer, if the default choices for the three queues are not satisfactory.

do.transp

Call this program on the 'origo' server to prepare a file for printing as a transparency on the 'o2' printer. Instructions are given above. You may want to remove the intermediate file 'overhead.ps' when you have got your printout.