Printing

"Dead tree format" documentation is still widely used, and here you'll find information on how to use it yourself.

List of Printers

There's quite a few printers setup on the network. If there is a duplex and a simplex queue listed, the duplex queue prints on both sides of the page while the simplex queue does single-sided printouts.

NOTE:

The duplex/simplex queues will only set that printing style if there is no information in the postscript file to override it. So if you're just sending plain postscript to a printer, the duplex queue will by default print it two sided, and the simplex queue single-sided. However, many programs that generate postscript will now add information to the file to say if it should be single or double sided. The queue will not override this decision. If you want to print single sided with a program that does this (for example, macos Preview or enscript) you must tell it to print single-sided!

• Room 138 (copier room)
  • HP Color LaserJet M653 - A

    Hostname - ast-hp-peyton-138-a.astro.princeton.edu

    duplex queue name = ps

    simplex queue name = pss

    Windows Queue name: \\iss228w.princeton.edu\ast_hp_peyton_138a_pcut

  • HP Color LaserJet M653 - B

    Hostname - ast-hp-peyton-138-b.astro.princeton.edu

    duplex queue name = color

    simplex queue name = colors

    Windows Queue name: \\iss228w.princeton.edu\ast_hp_peyton_138b_pcut

• Room 029 (basement)
  • HP Color Laserjet Pro M479

    Hostname - fred.astro.princeton.edu

    duplex queue name = fred

    simplex queue name = freds

• Room 027 (visitor office) Currently Offline
  • HP Color Laserjet Pro M479

    Hostname - ast-visitor-printer-027.astro.princeton.edu

    Windows Queue name: \\iss228w.princeton.edu\ast_hp_peyton_027_pcut

• 2nd Floor, next to the elevator Currently Offline
  • HP Color LaserJet M477fdn

    Hostname - waldorf.astro.princeton.edu

    duplex queue name = waldorf

    simplex queue name = waldorfs

Where to find drivers

If you are using a recent Mac, you won't need drivers as all of our printers now support AirPrint, which means you just need to add the printer by hostname and your Mac will handle the rest. Windows should download the drivers which are needed from the server when you add the printer.

As new printers come online, there comes the possibility that there isn't a preinstalled driver available for your machine. While we can't maintain a definitive list of drivers for all printers on all platforms, we can point you to where you can search for them. If given the opportunity to choose between a PCL or Postscript (PS) driver, we highly recommend using Postscript, since that's the language we ensure our print server uses to talk to our printers natively.

Using the printers

From Unix systems

To use a printer from the department Unix machines, simply choose which queue you wish to print to and specify that queue with your print command. For example, if printing with 'lpr', and you want the job to go to 'fred', type 'lpr -Pfred <filename.ps>'. You may prefer to use a graphical print manager, such as 'kprinter' which will let you select various options about the print job before it's sent through.

NOTE:

If you use kprinter to submit print jobs, you may find the '-c' option useful. This will copy the file to be printed to a temporary location before printing it, and delete the copy when finished. This is required if you're piping print jobs to kprinter from acroread, for example, because acroread will see kprinter's return to the shell as the cue to delete the temporary file that it created. kprinter will then complain that the source file does not exist, and won't be able to print the job.

From Laptops

If you have a laptop and would like to configure the printers on it, see the instructions later on in this page for Windows or Mac OS X

Linux machines may be able to just send to the queue name on gutenberg, as in 'lpr -Pps@gutenberg'. Or, if your machine uses CUPS, you may be able to find the printer in the "shared printers" area of your print client (though this doesn't always work well with the command line tools).

If your machine uses CUPS for its printer setups, then you can also edit the "ServerName" line in /etc/cups/client.conf to read "gutenberg.astro.princeton.edu". This will setup all the CUPS client software on your laptop to talk to our print server here, and no additional changes are needed.

NOTE:

Doing this means if you have a local printer setup, for example one you use at home, it will not work anymore unless you change the ServerName back to what it was.

From Windows

Our printers are now accessible from the OIT Print Servers. These instructions are based on their instructions. You will need an OIT netid and password in order to print using these instructions, but it should work from anywhere on campus, including wireless.

Look at the queue list above for the Windows Queue name for the printer you want to print to.

Right-click on the Start button and click run. Type the windows queue name for your printer and push enter.

Note: If you are not logged into the Princeton Windows domain, you will be prompted for your University netID and password, but you must add the princeton\ before your netID, like this -- princeton\netID

A window will appear for the printer you just installed. To set up the newly installed printer as the default printer, click on the Printer menu, and select Set As Default Printer.

From MacOS

Start out by finding the printer you want to print to in the list above. You will need to make note of the hostname (if available -- if not, you can't print to it from your laptop).

• Open System Settings and click Printers & Scanners
• Click the Add Printer, Scanner, or Fax button
• Select the IP (or globe icon) tab
• In the Address box enter the hostname of the printer you want to print to. We suggest using the fully-qualified domain name (that is the full name including the .astro.princeton.edu suffix).
• Select AirPrint for Protocol

  This should automatically query the printer and set the printer model.

• Leave Queue blank
• Click Add

A dialog may come up and ask you which options are installed on the printer. Usually the default settings are ok, but if you see 'Duplex Unit' as an option, make sure it is selected. If you know offhand that a printer has more than one paper tray (not counting the manual feed tray), then check off the options which are appropriate.

Repeat for any other printers you want to configure. The last printer you add is always selected as the default -- if you want to print to a different printer by default, highlight the printer and click "Make Default" at the top of the Printer List window.

FAQ

HELP! My laptop times out talking to the printer (or hangs indefinitely).

Printers only work when on a trusted network. That means using eduroam from a trusted (managed) computer or while plugged into a physical ethernet port. Also, make sure you don't have any non-University VPNs connected (such as the VPN for PPPL), since that will keep your laptop from being able to talk to our printers. If all else fails, please contact us for further assistance.

How do I use a specific printer by default?

By default, your print jobs will go to the queue "ps", which is the duplex queue on the Xerox Phaser 6350 in the copier room. To change this to a different printer, set the values of PRINTER and LPDEST in your shell dotfiles. For .cshrc:

• setenv LPDEST (queuename)
• setenv PRINTER $LPDEST

For .bashrc:

• export LPDEST=(queuename)
• export PRINTER=$LPDEST

(queuename) should be changed to the name of the print queue you wish to use.

How do I print multiple pages per side of the paper (aka n-up printing)?

If you have a postscript file, you can do so from the command line using the following syntax:

lp -dps -o number-up=2 filename.ps

Where ps is the queue name you want to print to and filename.ps is, well, your postscript file. You can set number-up to 2,4,6,9, or 16.

Why is my dvips output shifted vertically?

Ed Jenkins ran into an issue where the output from dvips was shifted up on the page, sometimes cutting things off and definitely throwing off any centering of the page vertically. After some trial and error, he found that the default dvips configuration was set to assume A4 paper was being used. By including '-t letter' in the options list, this was fixed.

How do I print landscaped text?

A quick way to get some text to print out in landscape mode without loading it in Firefox first is to use a2ps: 'a2ps -1 -L66 -r -B [filename]'. The options mean:

• -1 = Predefined font size and layout for 1 virtual page
• -L66 = Print 66 lines/page
• -r = Print in Landscape mode
• -B = no headers

If you use 'kprinter' to handle your print jobs, then you can select landscaped printouts on the "Advanced" screen.

Poster Printing Essentials

We no longer have a poster printer in the department; however there is another option on campus for printing posters.

Printing and Mailing Digital Print Center

OIT has recently announced their new Digital Print Center which can handle pretty much anything you can throw at them (digitally), including posters. You can charge to a university account or pay cash or credit card as well. For more information, please see their website.

If you need to convert your Postscript document to PDF for transfer to another location for printing, the following command should be used (even if the postscript file itself already defines the document as poster-sized)... otherwise you'll only get a 8.5x11 sized chunk of your document.

gs -sOutputFile=poster.pdf -dNOPLATFONTS -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE - dQUIET -dSAFER -sPAPERSIZE=a0 poster.ps -c quit

How do I merge multiple PDFs into a single file?

If you're on a Linux workstation (or possibly a Mac, too), you can use this command-line to merge multiple PDFs into a single file:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=outputfile.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf