There is an HP LaserJet 4M+ printer in Room 2128 for the convenience of persons with accounts in the Laboratory who have paid the Laboratory fee. Every person who pays the fee automatically receives a print quota of 125 pages (for the year). This is not a lot of pages, so use them sparingly.
To add paper to the printer, grasp under the bottom of the front of the unit and carefully slide the paper tray toward you. Place a stack of about 1/2 inch of paper into the tray and then carefully slide the tray back into position. Be sure the tray is properly aligned and DO NOT FORCE THE TRAY INTO POSITION. If it doesn't slide in easily, it is not positioned correctly.
Please report any printer problems by mailing to root. I will do my best to keep the printer operational, but I cannot afford to make it my full-time job, so you might have to wait a little while before I can get to it. Please do not attempt to service the printer yourself, except for adding paper as described above.
The name of the printer is ``lp'' and it is the system default
printer, so most commands that are set up to printing should automatically
spool to it. To send a file to the printer, you can use the command
a2ps''
program as follows:
a2ps format the text file in landscape
mode, with two text pages per output page. To find out how to select other
output formats, read the manual page for a2ps.
If you want to print TeX (.dvi) output, you will need to use
the ``dvi2ps'' utility to convert your file to PostScript
before printing. This can be done as follows:
-f'' flag to dvips
to direct the PostScript to the standard output instead of to the
printer.
When a file you have spooled to the printer is about to be printed,
it is first preprocessed on the print spooler server to determine the
number of pages to be printed. If the file is not a PostScript file,
printing will fail at this point, and you will receive mail indicating
that the spooler was unable to count the pages in your job.
If the number of pages to be printed is 20 pages or less, and in addition
printing these pages would not exceed your remaining print quota,
then the file will be sent to the printer. The spooler will refuse
to print jobs longer than 20 pages in order to prevent inexperienced users
from accidentally spending all their print quota in one fell swoop.
If you want to print a document that is longer than 20 pages, you will
have to break it up into pieces that are 20 pages or less.
The ``psselect'' utility can be used for this.
Once your file has been processed by the spooler, you will receive mail
indicating the disposition of the job, and the amount of print quota
you have remaining.
If you try to print a very complicated image, there is a small chance that it will take a very long time for the spooler to image your file in order to count the pages. To avoid hanging the print queue, there is a limit of 5 minutes of CPU time on the server for counting pages. If your job is more complex than this, you will be unable to print it. The symptoms will be a long wait, followed by an error message indicating that the server was unable to count the pages.
I believe I have now fixed the problem where the printer will sometimes silently refuse to print PostScript produced by Netscape. Thanks to Dario Vlah for tracking this one down and suggesting a patch. As a general rule, if you receive mail telling you that your quota was charged, but nothing comes out on the printer, don't keep trying over and over again. Send mail to root instead.
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