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All public access printers on campus are shared between the Macintosh and
UNIX machines. To achieve this, the printers are connected to the AppleTalk
network and appear to the Macintosh via the Chooser. A central print
spooling system is used to transfer files from the UNIX systems onto the
AppleTalk network. All of the printers, therefore, appear to the UNIX systems
as remote printers connected to a system called "laserhost." The
lpr spooling software is used to transfer files to laserhost
for printing.
All of the printers support PostScript, and the spooling software will
automatically detect files that appear to be plain text and convert them to
PostScript using a standard conversion filter. This is semi-smart in that it
tries to detect files with very long lines and select a landscape orientation
for those files. Files that are already PostScript are passed through without
change.
Every printer has a name, which is usually the same name as it is known to
the Macintosh Chooser. In some cases, the UNX name is an abbreviation of the
Macintosh name. The general command to print a file is lpr -Pprinter
file [ file ... ], where printer is the name of the
printer you want to use. Omitting the -Pprinter argument sends
the files to the default printer. The default printers are:
- Coos: kiewit_public
- Grafton: kiewit_public
- Belknap: kiewit_public
- Northstar workstations: Whichever public printer is physically the
closest
To change your personal default printer, you can set an environment variable
PRINTER to the name of the printer you want to use, and
thereafter, omit the -P option. For example, setenv
PRINTER kresge_public.
To check the status of a print job after submission, there are two utilities
available. Lpq will display the current status of the print
queue, but only until it has been transferred to the AppleTalk system. At that
point, the UNIX system considers the job completed. Pristat is
a locally written tool to query the AppleTalk print spooling software, and
shows essentially the same information as the Macintosh Print Monitor.
Similarly, there are two utilities to cancel a submitted print job.
Lprm will cancel a print job until it has been completely
passed to the AppleTalk system. Priabort is the equivalent
tool to cancel the job from the AppleTalk spooler.
Since there are so many printers on campus, not everyone has been enabled
for printing from UNIX. To see the complete list of what is enabled on any
specific machine, enter lpstat -t. To request that a new
printer be enabled, send e-mail to the manager at the specific machine.
For software with a built-in Print command, it should be
configured to call lpr -Pprinter if it is not already the
default. On the SGI Indy workstations, you can also print by dragging a file
icon onto the PrintPanel icon. If a built-in conversion tool
to turn that file into PostScript is not available on the machine, you will get
an error message.
Manual Pages to Check
- lpr
- lpq
- lprm
- lpstat
- pristat
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