Printing

Overview

All of our printers are now configured to be accessed through a single network address of "scroll.stanford.edu" controlled by our CUPS Server Each printer appears as one or more print queues on "scroll" both to Unix machines via "lpr", "xpp", or "kprinter" and to Windows machines via Samba or "ipp". With a single machine holding the print spool, everyone can now see the complete queue for each printer (with lpq) and can more easily cancel (with lprm) jobs submitted from your workstation. Things are somewhat less functional from windows (and the exact level of functionality changes from time to time). You can use the web interface to cancel your job, or authenticate as root and cancel or hold any jobs.

Those needing a large format printer for poster printing, may be granted the courtesy of using the HP Plotter in the SCIEN Imaging Lab. Please contact them directly for information.

Printers

The following printers are available (the links shown are to the printers embedded webserver which is only available on campus):

offset	HP LaserJet 4250n PS 1200 dpi 25 ppm duplex Postscript printer (pennies/page) Third floor printer for high-volume printing
lithograph	HP Color LaserJet CP4025 1200 dpi 35 ppm duplex color printer (dimes/page) Third floor color printer for transparencies, drafts of papers, research reports from the web

Printer Supplies

Printer supplies are in cabinet outside the printer alcove and should be pretty obvious. Spent toner cartridges should be returned to Gates 368 for recycling. Likewise, if you use one of the last toners or other supplies, tell Monica so she can reorder.

Plain paper is stocked in the drawers below the printers, but the main supplies are in the 377 copy room at the end of the wing.

Print manufacturers make their money on supplies and sadly the printers usually start blinking and complaining about low toner or ink when there's still 20% left. Therefore, we generally ignore the warnings and only replace supplies when the actual print quality has deteriorated.

Installing

All print jobs are sent to the spooling system on scroll which maintains a unified queue for each printer. Thus setting up a printer mainly involves telling the operating system how to find the printer.

Linux
Linux printers are accessed through the Common Unix Printing Systems (CUPS) by pointing the local CUPS system at scroll. To do this add a line in /etc/cups/client.conf:
ServerName scroll.stanford.edu
This line is added automatically if you install the graphics version of CentOS.

Additionally, you can use the lp, lpstat and cancel commands from the terminal to print (even if you haven't installed the printer). For example:
$ enscript -p - myfile.txt | lp -d offset -h scroll.stanford.edu -
will print "myfile.txt" to offset.
Macintosh OS-X
Open up the "Print & Fax" preference pane. Click the "+" to add a new printer. In the resulting dialog, choose "IP Printer" and enter the following information:

Protocol: Line Printer Daemon - LPD

Address: scroll.stanford.edu

Queue: Name of the printer, for example offset

Name: Name of the printer, for example offset

Note that the values for "Queue" and "Name" must match when the printer is initially added. The printer name can be changed later using the "Printer Setup" dialog. This appears to be an OS X 10.5 bug.

Location: Leave Blank

Print Using: Select make and model of printer.
The default Apple driver, Generic Postscript, which works for ordinary printing, but be sure to check the "Duplex" box when prompted.
Or: Choose the driver for the printer models above with the Select Printer Software... dialog

Then, click Add. Depending on the printer, you will likely be presented with an additional dialog to select installed options. For our printers, you'll want to check the "Duplex Unit" option
Note: However, to actually get duplex printing, you will have to later create a Preset with the Two-Sided option checked using the Apple printer dialogs.

Windows
Configuring printing in Windows depends primarily on whether a machine is always on campus or not.

On campus
For machines which are permanently located on campus, printing via the Windows SMB protocol is the most convenient because all the printer attributes can be automatically set by the Samba server. A simple way to set up is to use the Start Menu->Run and enter \\scroll in the command box. This will pop up an Explorer window (as you might imagine there are several other ways to get to this point) and once you select a printer, it will prompt you to set it up.
Off campus or mobile
For machines which are off-campus or mobile, the Windows SMB protocol is inappropriate and you should configure a web-printer using IPP. To set up a printer using IPP, run the "Add Printer" wizard and set up a network printer. The printer address is a URL of the form http://scroll.stanford.edu/printers/PRINTERNAME" where PRINTERNAME is the printer in question as it appears on the printer status web page, e.g. offset.
Drivers
Most drivers are in the default Windows distribution so things are likely to go through automatically. However, if your system does not have them, drivers for all our printers can be found in folders for each Windows variant under \\SCROLL\drivers.
Setting Printing Defaults
After the install, you can use the "Properties" dialog to describe details about the printer's capabilities, e.g. duplexing. One thing worth doing, especially if you print large jobs, is to set the print scheduling to go "directly" to the printer. This avoids spooling the jobs on your local disk since they'll be spooled on scroll anyway.
To set device defaults, select (highlight) a printer, pull-down "File" and "Document Defaults" and you can set things like duplex or grayscale. This is important since Windows always configures the printer for each job, so even though the laser printer "offset" is normally set in duplex, you can default to single-sided printing in Windows.
Set the defaults you want as you can override them for single documents easily in the Print dialogs of applications like Word.
The list of all jobs in the print queue is available for each printer. You may cancel any jobs that you own before they print.

Printing Tips

Printing from Unix

The CUPS system provides command replacements for both the traditional Unix lpr (BSD) and lp (SysV) printing subsystems. The lpstat command provides many options for looking and printer and job status. A quick summary can be obtained with:

lpstat -o -v
which might, for example show:

offset-3141 descartes 14336 Sat 17 Jan 2004 11:18:43 AM PST
The user descartes can remove that job with:

cancel 3141 offset

There are a number of printer GUIs available for Linux. The nicest at the moment is kprinter which is part of the KDE package (and is the default printing dialog of any KDE program). You can use it from within other programs by using "kprinter" as the printer command (use "kprinter --stdin" if the program pipes the input to the print command). The program xpp also has similar functionality, but a much uglier interface. However, it does not require KDE.

Printing Plaintext Files

Since CUPS abstracts printing as postscript, you can use any one of a number of utilities to reformat text. Many of these provide for rotated, 2up, and 4up printing. See the man pages for imprint, lptops, enscript, a2ps etc.

To quickly print text files 2up, use:

     a2ps -2 file.txt

Transparencies

To print transparencies, make sure you load the right stock into the printer. This is relatively easy since we always use the supplies from the manufacturer.

On "tone", transparencies shouldn't be put into the tray. Rather, you should open both the auxiliary input and output tray doors on the right side to feed and retrieve the slides. This method shortens and straightens the paper path through the printer so that you minimize crumpling.

Printing to special paper

If you want to print to special paper (for example 3 hole punch paper) the proper thing to do is to use the manual feed tray. To do this using lpr, add "-o inputslot=manualfeed" to your lpr command (on linux only). For windows, kprinter, xpp, just select manual feed in the printer setting dialog.
Note: On offset and other HP LaserJets, the paper width sliders must be all the way in to the middle to close the manual feed tray.

offset doesn't wait very long for you to load paper into the manual feed tray, so load your paper before printing (this can change if people complain). offset will pause when the manual feed job is to be printed and waits until either paper is loaded or the big round button is pushed.

Problems?

The CUPS server at scroll is Linux machine in the printer alcove. Its webserver shows the current status and the queues for each printer. You can use that interface to cancel suspect jobs.

For other problems, send e-mail to support.