This section discusses some of the miscellaneous things that you may want to know about printing under Linux.
Since most ASCII files are not formatted for printing, it is useful to format them in some way before they are actually printed. This may include putting a title and page number on each page, setting the margins, double spacing, indenting, or printing a file in multiple columns. A common way to do this is to use a print preprocessor such as pr.
$ pr +4 -d -h"Ph.D. Thesis, 2nd Draft" -l60 thesis.txt | lpr
In the above example, pr would take the file thesis.txt
and skip the first three pages (+4), set the page length to sixty lines
(-l60), double space the output (-d), and add the phrase "Ph.D. Thesis, 2nd
Draft" to the top of each page (-h). Lpr would then queue
pr's output. See its on-line manual page for more information on
using pr.
All of the commands in the Linux printing system accept the -P option. This option allows the user to specify which printer to use for output. If a user doesn't specify which printer to use, then the default printer will be assumed as the output device.
Instead of having to specify a printer to use every time that you print, you can set the PRINTER environment variable to the name of the printer that you want to use. This is accomplished in different ways for each shell. For bash you can do this with
$ PRINTER="printer_name"; export PRINTER
and csh, you can do it with
% setenv PRINTER "printer_name"
These commands can be placed in your login scripts (.profile for bash, or .cshrc for csh), or issued on the command-line. (See bash(1) and csh(1) for more information on environment variables.)
Printing graphics files through a printer usually depends on the kind of graphics you're converting, and the kind of printer you want to send to. Dot matrix is usually out of the question due to differences in the way dot-matrix handles graphics. Your best bet in this situation is to see if your printer is compatable with an Epson or an IBM ProPrinter, then convert the graphics file to PostScript, then use Ghostscript (see next section) to print the graphics.
If you have a laser printer, things are a bit easier since many are compatable with PCL. This now gives you a few options. Some programs may output directly in PCL. If not, programs like NetPBM can convert into PCL. Last option is to use ghostscript (see next section).
Your absolutely best option is to install packages like NetPBM and Ghostscript then installing a magic filter to process the graphics files automagically.
Printing PostScript files on a printer that has a PostScript interpreter is simple; just use lpr, and the printer will take care of all of the details for you. For those of us that don't have printers with PostScript capabilities, we have to resort to other means. Luckily, there are programs available that can make sense of PostScript, and translate it into a language that most printers will understand. Probably the most well known of these programs is Ghostscript.
Ghostscript's responsibility is to convert all of the descriptions in a PostScript file to commands that the printer will understand. To print a PostScript file using Ghostscript, you might do something like
$ gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=deskjet -sOutputFile=|lpr thesis.ps
Notice in the above example that we are actually piping the output of Ghostscript to the lpr command by using the -sOutputFile option.
Ghostview is an interface to Ghostscript for the X Window System. It allows you to preview a PostScript file before you print it. Ghostview and Ghostscript can both be swiped from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/.
While there is no Adobe PDF viewer, there is an xpdf program which will print out Postscript data.
One of the easiest ways to print TeX files is to convert them to PostScript and then print them using Ghostscript. To do this, you first need to convert them from TeX to a format known as DVI (which stands for device-independent). You can do this with the tex(1) command. Then you need to convert the DVI file to a PostScript file using dvips. All of this would look like the following when typed in.
$ tex thesis.tex
$ dvips thesis.dvi
Now you are ready to print the resulting PostScript file as described above.
troff formatted files
$ groff -Tascii thesis.tr | lpr
or, if you prefer,
$ groff thesis.tr > thesis.ps
and then print the PostScript file as described above.
man pages
$ man man | col -b | lpr
The man pages contain pre-formatted troff data, so we have to strip
out any highlighting, underlines, etc. The 'col' program does this just
nicely, and since we're piping data, the man program won`t use
more.