CUPS specific printing documentation

Some of these notes reflect DAMTP-specific featues of the CUPS setup, and so may not be true for other places.

Changing the duplex options (printing single-sided)

By default all of our printers which support double-sided (duplex) printing will do so on any job sent to them. If you want to print a document single-sided then you should add:

  -o sides=one-sided

to the command-line.

Likewise to specify the other types of duplexing you can use:

  -o sides=two-sided-long-edge
  -o sides=two-sided-short-edge

where the default is usually two-sided-long-edge.

Selecting media type or source

By default most of our printers are set to print onto Plain A4 paper, but you might need something else, e.g. OHPs/Transparencies then you need to select the right media type or the document will usually be printed on Plan paper.

Note that although you can also pick any valid type that the printer understands. Usually if you ask for a type/size that the printer doesn't currently have it will pause and ask for it to be loaded.

If you ask for something that the printer cannot do -- e.g. an unknown type or a size it cannot support -- then the job is usually just printed on whatever media the printer does have, though it might get be thrown away.

Some other common media/source options include

  -o media=A3
  -o media=Letterhead
  -o ManualFeed=True
  -o InputSlot=Tray3_500

Note that in general the possible options are printer specific.

N-up printing

The defaults are 1-up for most documents but 2-up for plain-text. Options for changing these exist and will be documented properly later. If you want text printed 1-up add

  -o number-up=1

to the command-line or generate the postscript yourself e.g. with a2ps etc.

on the Linux machines you can use GUI utilities like kprinter to select from the available options. We provide a script guiprint which calls a suitable GUI printing application and can be called from applications like web-browsers etc. Currently this ends up launching kprinter but that may change in future setups.

Summary and examples

In summary here are some common recipes (for single-sided, printing on OHPs).

A few common examples. Printing single-sided on g1:

  lpr -Pg1 -o sides=one-sided ...

Printing on OHPs on the galaxy printer:

  lpr -Pgalaxy -o media=Transparency ...

Printing on OHPs on the g0c printer:

  lpr -Pg0c -o media=ColorLaserTransparency ...

Printing on OHPs on the g1 printer:

  lpr -Pg1 -o media=MonoTransparency ...

Please email any suggestions, corrections or errors to the printer helpline