Printing (and Viewing)

Additional links:	Viewing and printing certain file types Printing from Pine, Acrobat Reader, or xdvi Printing documents formatted for A4-sized paper Common printing problems Setting up printing from Macs

Viewing Files

Often it is sufficient just to view a file on the screen, instead of printing it. This saves paper (and it saves your page quota for printing).

The instructions for viewing files depends on the file type; see the link Viewing and printing certain file types.

Basic Printing Commands

These are the basic commands for sending output to printers:

lpr f1 f2 ...	Send files 'f1', 'f2', ... to the printer queue. They will wait their turns in the queue and then be printed.
print f1 f2 ...	Format the files by name and page number; then send them to the queue for printing.
lpq	Show what jobs are in the printer queue.
lprm -	Remove all your files from the printer queue.
lprm jobno jobno ...	Remove your print jobs with the specified job numbers from the printer queue. Job numbers are shown under the 'Job' column in the output from the 'lpq' command.

Note: The lprm command must be executed on the same machine as you used when sending the file(s) to the printer.

Users interested in more control when printing text files (e.g., multiple columns, different fonts or sizes) should look at the manual page for the enscript command.

Public Printers

The publicly available printers are:

Printer	Location	Printer Model
744	Room 744	HP LaserJet 8150DN
838	Room 838	HP LaserJet 4350
1002	Room 1002	HP LaserJet 4350dtn
958_large	Room 958 (copy room)	Large copier
958_small	Room 958 (copy room)	Small copier

To get a definitive list of all printers on the system (including private printers), use the command

lpstat -a

or access the web interface to our CUPS printing system, at http://printserver.math.berkeley.edu:631/ and click on Printers on the title bar.

Asking for a Specific Printer

If one of the above commands responds with an error message No default destination or _default: unknown printer, or if you wish to change the default printer used for these commands, you can either add an argument beginning with -P to the printer command, such as:

lpr -P744 file1 file2 ...

or you can set the PRINTER environment variable, using the setenv command, such as:

setenv PRINTER 744

If you do the latter, you only need to do it once per window; you can also put the setenv command in your .cshrc file.

Single-Sided Printing

To print single-sided output, add -o Duplex=None to the lpr or lp command. Within other applications, there may be ways of selecting single-sided printing, but that depends on the application.

Printing from AirBears

It is now possible to print from a computer connected to the network by a wireless connection (AirBears).

To set up your computer for doing this, follow the instructions for your operating system:

Unix/Linux without CUPS
Macintosh and other CUPS systems
Microsoft Windows (instructions not available yet)

Additional links:	Viewing and printing certain file types Printing from Pine, Acrobat Reader, or xdvi Printing documents formatted for A4-sized paper Common printing problems Setting up printing from Macs

Last updated 25 January 2013