TEACH PRINTING                                    Aaron Sloman, Oct 1998

Here is a list of useful online files concerning printing facilities for
Poplog and VED users here in Birmingham.

If you read this file in VED, you can put the VED cursor at the
asterisk and type "ESC h". That will then follow up the cross
reference. "ESC n" takes you to the Next cross reference.

CHECKING THE PRINTER QUEUE
Before giving a print command you should
    (a) check that the printer has paper loaded, and that it looks
    as if it is in a usable state (e.g. there is not a huge pile of
    paper on it.
    (b) check the queue of jobs for the printer. You can check the
    queue by giving the following command either on the VED command
    line, or directly to a unix shell prompt (e.g in an xterm window).

        lpq -P<printername>

e.g., in VED

        ENTER lpq -Plw-g3

(when that command is given in Ved you can leave out "-P".)

More information on printing is available in the following files.

HELP PRINTING.TXT
    and gives an overview of printers available in the school, which
    type they are, where they are, and who can use them.

    This is a link to /bham/doc/system/printing.txt
    NB Currently this file is out of date. If you can use a Web browser
    you can get more up to date information from the online student
    handbook:
        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/studentinfo/computing-handbook/

    The laser printers connected to the Unix network are `postscript'
    printers. That means that they can only print files that have the
    "postscript" format. Other files have to be converted to postscript.

    The psprint command described next, converts plain text files to
    postscript and sends them to a printr.

HELP VED_PSPRINT
    Tells you how to use VED to print a plain text file (e.g. a program
    file) on a postscript printer. The VED commands
        ENTER psprint
    and
        ENTER psprintmr
    described in that file make use of the unix "a2ps" program to
    convert your text file to postscript, so that the printer can print
    it.

    The first command works on the whole file, the second on the marked
    range. See the HELP file for more details.

    The help file gives information about several options, including
    changing font size, printing two pages side by side (landscape
    mode) or one page at a time (portrait mode). If your file has some
    very long lines, e.g. more than 75 characters long, then you may
    need to use a small font, e.g. 7.5

    If you want to know more about options in the a2ps program, you can
    read the Unix information file about it (the "MAN(ual) file") by
    giving VED the command

        ENTER man a2ps

    or you can directly run the unix "man" command by typing to the
    shell, in an Xterm window:
        man a2ps

TEACH LATEX, TEACH LATEX.TEX, HELP LATEX, HELP VED_LATEX
    These files tell you how to use LaTeX, a very sophisticated
    text formatting package, which can be driven from VED.

    If you have trouble using this on one of the DEC Alpha workstations,
    try logging through to one of the Suns to run VED there.

HELP RNO
    Tells you about a slightly more sophisticated formatting and
    printing mechanism which you can use for project reports and essays.
    It describes how you can use VED to prepare files using the NROFF
    or TROFF formatting commands, and then preview them in VED and
    finally get them printed.

HELP LPR
    Tells you how to invoke the unix lpr command from inside VED.
    This is only suitable for printing either a postscript file to
    a postscript printer or a non-postscript file to a non-postscript
    printer. It does no file conversion. See also MAN LPR
    (Not recommend on our Unix network. Use psprint, or psprintmr )


SPECIFYING A PRINTER
For Unix printing commands you need to specify the printer to which
file should go for printing. You normally do this by using the format
    -P<printername>

e.g.
    ENTER psprint -Plw-g3

to print a plain text file to the laser printer called "lw-g3"

USING THE ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE $PRINTER
If you always use the same printer, you can use the Unix environment
variable $PRINTER to tell programs which printer to use. The variable
can be set in your .login file, by the following command:

    setenv PRINTER <printername>

e.g.

    setenv PRINTER lw-g3

After putting that line (with the appropriate printer name) in your
.login file, you will need to log out and log in again, or you can type
that command in an xterm window, direct to unix, before starting up VED.

If you set the PRINTER variable in your .login file then if ever you
forget to specify the printer name in a print command it will always go
to that printer, even if that is not what you want!

If you do not set the printer environment variable, you will need to
specify the printer to be used every time you give a printing command,
e.g. by adding the "flag" -P<printer name> to the printing command.


REPORTING PROBLEMS
If there are problems with printers you should report them on the
logging notice on the wall in the lab and/or send an email message
to "support".

Make the subject line indicate the problem, and then give further
details in the body of the message.


For a lot more information about Unix commands see

    TEACH UNIX.INTRO
    HELP UNIX.COMMANDS
    HELP SHELL


--- $poplocal/local/teach/printing
--- Copyright University of Birmingham 2000. All rights reserved. ------