Printing in Linux

Printing in Linux is easy, with the cups »http://www.cups.org printing software. Postscript is the most common format for printing in *nix. Most programs in *nix can produce postscript output. To print these files, open the kprinter program by typing kprinter in a console. It will list all printers available, and it should be obvious how to proceed (quite similar to windows).

It is wise to preview postscript before printing it, especially large posters. You can preview postscript with any of the following programs: kghostview, gs, gv, ...

Any program can be set up to use kprinter by default. Setup the program to print to "kprinter --stdin" (without quotes) instead of lpr, which will direct standard output to kprinter.

Printing in Unix (Solaris)

Printing from solaris is similar, assuming cups is installed. Lahave has cups installed, so simply type the command "glp" at the terminal, and a nice gui will come up for printing postscript files. It also gives many options for the available printers. Alternatively use lp to print, type "man lp" for help with this old program.

Printing from Claritas is a special case. It uses HP RTL (rasters) for printing instead of postscript, which is more efficient. The HP large format plotter on the 4th floor can handle these files natively. Kprinter can be used to send the raw .rtl file to the plotter. You can also ftp this file (or a postscript file) to the plotter, by simply using command line ftp (current IP for this printer is 129.173.3.193). These rtl files can be previewed with "Xrtl" and converted to a tiff with the Claritas "tiffrtl" program.

Attempting to print a large file (from CorelDraw for example) directly to the printer can be a tricky operation - often the print job will fail. A better method seems to convert the output to a pdf and print from Adobe Reader.

print to a postscript file (using the HP5000 printer driver available from hp.com or the Corel device indepedent postscript file) and convert to pdf, and finally print to the plotter from the pdf using the Adobe Reader. Note: the plotter is supposed to accept pdf 1.3 files directly, but I have not been able to get this to work (Chris). Adobe Illustrator is reported to work much better with the HP plotter so plotting directly to it be an option.

Here is the command used with ghostscript (cygwin version) to convert the hp postscript to a pdf with lossless image compression (Adobe Distiller fails some of the larger postscript files so ghostscript used instead):

ps2pdf -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode poster.ps poster.pdf

If the ps2pdf conversion isn't using the proper papersize, it can be specified with the following options added to the above command (one point is 1/72 of an inch). The following example would make a pdf with 90x42 inch paper.

-dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=6480 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=3024

If none of these tricks work, try exporting the file as a large tiff at 300 dpi (same as the printer) and sending the tiff file to the printer.

The hardware address of the NIC for the HP printer was registered with the NOC people at Dal. This printer will automatically obtain an address through DHCP unless there is a problem. If DHCP is not working, try bootp.