CSG Q&A on Printing

Department of Computing	Imperial College London
Q&A on Printing

For more LaTeX queries see the LaTeX Q&A.

How can I print a text file in two columns from Linux?
How do I print multiple pages per page?
How do we access the printers in the Post Room?
How should I best convert LaTeX or Postscript to PDF?

How can I print a text file in two columns from Linux?

This command will format a text file in two column landscape style,and send the output to the named printer:

enscript -Pprintername -2r filename

See the manual page for enscript for further formatting options (type man enscript at the command line).

How do I print multiple pages per page?

The psnup utility enables you to take a postscript document and produce a modified postscript document fitting several original pages on each new page (i.e. like lecture notes). psnup -2 and psnup -4 are most common.

For example, for 4 landscape A4 pages resized to 1 A4 the appropriate command would be:

psnup -4 original.ps print.ps

and then print "print.ps" as normal (after previewing with gv).

Or, two print 2 up directly to a printer:

psnup -2 file.ps | lpr -Pprintername

See man psnup for more info. psnup is part of the psutils package.

How do we access the printers in the Post Room?

chalk and slate should only be used by staff and research students. Certain features require a Dept ID and password which can be obtained from the General Office.

How should I best convert LaTeX or Postscript to PDF?

We don't have Acrobat Distiller because this would have to be purchased at a cost of about £20 per workstation.

Adobe have a web-hosted service which might be worth investigating.

There are a couple of free programs which can convert Postscript to pdf. All the Linux machines should have ps2pdf installed. It is not as full-featured as Distiller, and cannot perform compression due to licence restrictions. However, the pdf files produced are about half the size of the original postscript, as long as the source file uses standard Postscript fonts. Otherwise, they get converted to bitmap format and the pdf is then nothing but a very very large image file.

We recommend that you use the following command sequences:

If you want to produce a PDF from LaTeX, or you have a DVI file:
```
	latex file.tex
	dvipdf file.dvi
```
If you have a PS file with no DVI, which you wish to convert to PDF:
```
	ps2pdf file.ps
```

You may have success using pdflatex, but I don't know of anyone in the Department using that right now.