logo Printing

Overview
Printers
Printer Supplies
Installing
Printing Tips
Problems?



Overview

All of our printers are now configured to be accessed through a single network address of "scroll.stanford.edu" controlled by our
CUPS Server Each printer appears as one or more print queues on "scroll" both to Linux machines via "lpr", "xpp", or "kprinter" and to Windows machines via Samba or "ipp". With a single machine holding the print spool, everyone can now see the complete queue for each printer (with lpq) and can more easily cancel (with lprm) jobs submitted from your workstation. Things are somewhat less functional from windows (and the exact level of functionality changes from time to time). You can use the web interface to cancel your job, or authenticate as root and cancel or hold any jobs.

Printers

The following printers are available (the links shown are to the printers embedded webserver which is only available on campus):

Printer Supplies

Plain paper is stocked in the drawers next to the printers, but the main supplies are in the 380 pantry at the end of the wing.

Printer supplies such as toner are handled by the admins in Gates 377 and 379 Spent toner cartridges should be returned to Gates 377 for recycling.

Plain paper is stocked in the drawers next to the printers, but the main supplies are in the 380 pantry at the end of the wing.

Print manufacturers make their money on supplies and sadly the printers usually start blinking and complaining about low toner or ink when there's still 20% left. Therefore, we generally ignore the warnings and only replace supplies when the actual print quality has deteriorated.


Installing

All print jobs are sent to the spooling system on scroll which maintains a unified queue for each printer. Thus setting up a printer mainly involves telling the operating system how to find the printer.

Printing Tips

Printing from Linux

The CUPS system provides command replacements for both the traditional Linux lpr (BSD) and lp (SysV) printing subsystems. The lpstat command provides many options for looking and printer and job status. A quick summary can be obtained with:
lpstat -o -v
which might, for example show:
letterpress-3141 descartes 14336 Sat 17 Jan 2004 11:18:43 AM PST
The user descartes can remove that job with:
cancel 3141 letterpress

There are a number of printer GUIs available for Linux. The nicest at the moment is kprinter which is part of the KDE package (and is the default printing dialog of any KDE program). You can use it from within other programs by using "kprinter" as the printer command (use "kprinter --stdin" if the program pipes the input to the print command). The program xpp also has similar functionality, but a much uglier interface. However, it does not require KDE.

Printing Plaintext Files

Since CUPS abstracts printing as postscript, you can use any one of a number of utilities to reformat text. Many of these provide for rotated, 2up, and 4up printing. See the man pages for imprint, lptops, enscript, a2ps etc.

To quickly print text files 2up, use:

     a2ps -2 file.txt

Transparencies

To print transparencies, make sure you load the right stock into the printer. This is relatively easy since we always use the supplies from the manufacturer.

On "tone", transparencies shouldn't be put into the tray. Rather, you should open both the auxiliary input and output tray doors on the right side to feed and retrieve the slides. This method shortens and straightens the paper path through the printer so that you minimize crumpling.

Printing to special paper

If you want to print to special paper (for example 3 hole punch paper) the proper thing to do is to use the manual feed tray. To do this using lpr, add "-o inputslot=manualfeed" to your lpr command (on linux only). For windows, kprinter, xpp, just select manual feed in the printer setting dialog.
Note: On letterpress and other HP LaserJets, the paper width sliders must be all the way in to the middle to close the manual feed tray.

letterpress doesn't wait very long for you to load paper into the manual feed tray, so load your paper before printing (this can change if people complain). letterpress will pause when the manual feed job is to be printed and waits until either paper is loaded or the big round button is pushed.


Problems?

For problems, send e-mail to action@cs.


Last update: January 23, 2019 01:48:07 PM
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