Department of Engineering

Printing

Contents

Introduction

There are 2 stages to printing on our centralized printers - sending the file to a queue, then authorising the printing of the file.

  • Sending the file - Most applications (like matlab, mailers, etc) have their own printing commands. From the command line you can use lp to send files to the printer queues, but DON'T try to print executable programs
  • Authorising the printing - before output gets printed, you have to confirm your intentions and pay. Two methods exist

Getting DPO output

The default printer (i.e. the printer which is used if no special option is used) is likely to be the nearest laser printer (e.g. printout from the DPO will go to ljmr - a general term for ljmr1/ljmr2) but other printers are available. To find out what your default printer is, type lpstat -d from the command line.

Recent output is placed on tables by the printers. Old output is soon thrown away. To see whether your job's been printed, go to the Printer Accounting web page or (if you're on a DPO terminal) you can use the KJobViewer program from the More Applications menu. For a full list of queued jobs see the jobs page.

Cancelling jobs

If you've authorised the job using Uniflow, you can't cancel. If you've authorised using CUED's Teaching System Print Accounting you can go to the Teaching System Printer Accounting web page to cancel a job you haven't yet authorised, or use cancel -a printer_name to cancel all your print jobs queued for a particular printer. To cancel one of many jobs already authorised, use cancel job_number (where job_number is the job's identification code shown on the Printer Accounting web page). If that doesn't work see an operator fast.

Main Teaching System Printers

B/W Laser Printers

The following 2 printers are in the "Self Service Printer Room" at end of the DPO furthest from the main staircase. If you print to ljmr your output will go to the least busy of the 2 printers.

ljmr1 By the operators' office in the DPO. Duplex (two-sided) A4 output is the default. Capable of A3 output.
ljmr2 Next to ljmr1. Duplex (two-sided) A4 output is the default. Capable of A3 output.

The following printer is in the Inglis Electrical Lab

ljidp Duplex (two-sided) A4 output is the default. Capable of A3 output.

Colour Printers

cljmrn A4/A3 output. Duplex

This printer is in the "Self Service Printer Room" at end of the DPO furthest from the main staircase. The syntax of the lp command to send to cljmrn is "lp -dcljmrn file_name " for plain A4.

There are several other printers in the EIE Teaching Lab (ljiel1, ljiel3, eietl1, cljiel1, cljiel2) but they're used for particular labs and are not always generally available.

In the "Self Service Printer Room" and in several other places around the department there are Canon printers. You send output to them by specifying the "Uniflow Server" from the list of available printers, then log in to the printer where you want the output to appear. See the Uniflow Printing and Photocopying page for details on how to pay.

For information on printing to the main printers from a MS Windows PC see the More printing matters page.

Printing Charges

All printing to cljmrn, ljidp, and ljmr (i.e. ljmr1 and ljmr2) now goes via the print authorisation system. This system requires everyone to pay (no matter how small the job). Payment is only by job number or quota - we cannot directly accept cash for printing to cljmrn, ljidp or ljmr1/2.

See the Computer Printout Account and Charging page for more information.

You need to see the operators if you wish to print transparencies or on photo paper.

Commands, features and paper-saving

Where possible, we're trying to make programs print using a standard Printing Panel. This lets you choose the printer (the default provided is usually the one you want). It also has a "Properties" button which leads to a panel like the one on the right. This lets you control whether the output will be double-sided ("Duplex Printing") and how many pages per sheet you want. Not all of the other options will work (for example, we override the "Banner" page option, and we don't have all the page-sizes offered).
If the program you use doesn't offer the "Print Panel" you may have to use the command line to get what you want. Full details about printing using the command line are in the CUPS Software Users Manual. Here are some extracts and local additions -

  • Window dumps - The "Applications Panel" (click on the green arrow at the foot of the screen) contains "Take Screenshot" and "KSnapshot" programs both of which can do screen-dumps. Alternatively you can use import from the command line. For example, typing import pix.jpg will create a jpeg file called pix.jpg (you can also create postscript files pix.ps, pix.eps, etc). After starting the command, clicking with the left mouse-button on a window will dump the whole window. If instead you use the middle mouse-button you can select a rectangle by dragging. The gimp program also has window-dumping facilities. The grab-and-print program exists too, but should only be used with the Pro-Engineer program.
  • Printing parts of documents - lp -o page-ranges=1-4 ... will print pages 1-4 of a document. You can also do things like lp -o page-ranges=1-4,7,9-12.
  • N-UP output - This is the general term used when describing how many "pages" are going to be printed on each side of paper. 2-up output for example is when 2 pages from the document are printed on each side of paper. NUP output lp -o number-up=4 ... puts 4 pages on each side of paper. Another way to do n-up printing is to use the psnup program. The input file needs to be postscript. To produce 4-up output from a DVI file called filename.dvi, type "dvips -f < filename.dvi | psnup -4 | lp -dljmr1". To print out an A5 booklet from a postscript file "doc.ps" use "booklet doc.ps"
  • "Banner page" information - The psheader command places the bannerpage info at the top of a postscript page before sending it to a printer. Using this as the printing command in netscape or mozilla might save paper, as will saving as postscript and using psnup. The booklet program will print a postscript file out as an A5 booklet.
  • Matlab - Inside matlab you can use cuedpr to print your graphics out with the header information on the graphics page.
  • Text in landscape mode - Try "lp -o landscape filename"
  • Single-sided output - By default, most output is double-sided. For single sided use lp -o sides=one-sided .... from the command line. You can get single-sided output from OpenOffice by switching to Off the Duplex Property available from the Print panel.
  • A3 output - try lp -o media=A3 ... from the command line if you can't find an option on a Print dialog panel.
  • Landscape Printing - Use lp's "-o landscape" option from the command line if you can't find an option on a Print dialog panel.
  • Setting the default printer - Running "defaultprinter" will let you choose your default printer using the mouse. Alternatively use the command-line version lpoptions - "lpoptions -d ljmr" for example will set the default to be the DPO printers.

Troubleshooting

  • If your print job doesn't appear when you expect it to, do not just try sending it again. Find out why it failed to print, and only send it again when you are sure that you haven't filled up a disk on the local or a remote machine, or printed it to a different printer than the one you expected. Do not hassle the operators unless you've first checked the printer queues online.
  • If you have a postscript problem, see the Postscript errors page. If a big postscript file doesn't print out, try converting it to PDF using the installed ps2pdf program. If you have a file called foo.ps then running ps2pdf foo.ps will create a foo.pdf file.
  • If you have a PDF problem, maybe the format of the file's too new - we can't print PDF 1.5 files directly. Using the Acrobat Reader, do "Print to file" and print the resulting postscript file.
  • Applications (e.g. OpenOffice) do not always set the correct options for a printer, for example the wrong paper tray for a given paper size may be specified or simply an unsupported paper size like US letter. This will generally cause the print job either to be rejected or stalled. If these problems occur, check the printer properties in the application.
  • If you get a cover sheet and a blank page, it may be that you're trying to print a page that is too dark - we suppress such pages because they damage the monochrome printers .
  • See the Printing section of the Known bugs/features page
  • See the Frequently Asked Questions: Printing

Copiers and other printers

Some general access printers and photocopiers exist. They use an accounting system that was updated in November 2010.

See also