Duke University
Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development

Computing & Statistics Lab

Chapter 5 - Printing - You've seen the video, now read the book

Print commands and their options -

     The geri system provides three programs that simplify printing your
files - 'lpBOX', 'geriprint' and 'hp3'. 'lpBOX' and 'geriprint' both do
the same thing but, 'geriprint' presents a menu of options that you can
use to format your output. With 'lpBOX' you need to specify the options
you want on the command line at the time you issue the command. To see
what those options are and how to specify them, just issue the command
'lpBOX -h'.

     The printer you will most likely be printing to is called 'bigbox'.
It is capable of single sided or double sided printing and virtual pages.
Virtual pages allow you to put the image of more than one page on the same
side of a piece of paper. Two virtual pages per side of paper is practical
in that the type is still large enough to see, and you can save quite a
bit of paper by fitting up to four pages on a single sheet when also using
double sided mode.

     'bigbox' is located in room 1502 in the Blue Zone. It is clearly
labeled on the side. Your printout will be in the output tray unless
someone who has come to pick up their printout has moved it closer to
the door. 

     The 'hp3' program prints to the printer in room 0502 in the Blue
Zone. This printer is not capable of double sided printing or virtual
pages. Usually all you will do to print to this printer is issue the
command 'hp3 filename'. If you want to see the options that are available,
issue the command 'hp3 -h'.

Killing a job sent by mistake -

	To kill a print job sent by mistake requires a number of steps.
Small jobs will get sent to the printer faster than you can delete them
from the queue. There is nothing you can do about these.

	Once you have determined that a job is wasting a lot of paper
and needs to be killed, you should turn off the printer immediately.
Next find out the job id number of print job to be killed by issuing
the command 'lpq -P printer_name'. You will see a list of only those
jobs that you own. Make note of the id number of the job you wish to
kill, then issue the command 'lprm -P printer_name job_id'.

	Turn the printer back on and see what happens. 'bigbox' can
retain a print job in memory even if the power has been turned off. If
another page from your job comes out, press the 'On Line' button to take
the printer off line. You now need to remove the job from the printer's
memory. Press the 'Menu' button twice to get to the 'Job Control Menu'.
Press the 'Item' button once to see 'Cancel Job'. Press the 'Select'
button and then the 'On Line' button to put the printer back on line.