Using less paper when printing

Often documents can be printed with two or more sheets to a physical page. This can be combinded with double-sided printing. This document describes how to do this for some different file types.

plain text or html files, eg c source code: The command to use is a2ps. To print two pages of a file to one pysical sheet of paper use the a2ps command. Syntax is
```
	a2ps -2 filename
```
which will print the output to your default printer. To print four pages of a file on one page, the command would be a2ps -4 filename. On the damtp unix system a2ps defaults to a2ps -2.
To print to a specific printer use
```
	a2ps -2 filename -Pprinter-name
```
To save the output to a file, add -o newfilename.ps to the command, for example to create a postscript file newfile.ps which has four pages on each page. as in
```
	a2ps -4 filename -o newfile.ps 
```
the output will be saved as a postscript file. a2ps can also be used to print other number of pages of a file on a page. For more information check its online manual at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/computing/manuals/a2ps_3.html#SEC23
pdf files: a2ps See plain text files above for command line usage of a2ps. If you are printing from within acroread or xpdf the command to use is
```
	/usr/bin/a2ps 
```
/usr/bin is prepended to a2ps in acroread because otherwise acroread tries to use an older version of a2ps, gives an error message and fails to print. The other options are described above under plain text.
postscript,ps,gs files: a2ps See plain text files above for usage.
dvi files: Use dvired, dvired is like dvips except it puts two pages on each physcial sheet of paper. Usage
```
	dvired filename.dvi
```
if you have a default printer set. To print to a specific printer, add -Pprintername to the command as in
```
  	dvired filename.dvi -Pprinter-name 
```
To save the output to a postscript file instead of printing use the -o option,
```
	dvired -o newfile.ps filename.dvi
```

Note that when printing documents intended to be booklets things like psbook may be useful to re-size/re-order the pages (e.g. the pages may have to be re-ordered depending on the number of pages in each bundle to the folded)...

We do not recommend using the mpage command as is not always able to cope with printing double sided.

Please email any suggestions, corrections, broken links, or errors to itweb [itweb@damtp.cam.ac.uk]