Re: HP Laser printer in economymode in Linux

[Sudhakar Chandrasekharan <thaths@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Umamahesh proclaimed:
>  I have a HP laser printer. and i want to use it in economy mode in Red
> hat linux. how do i do it ?

Printing under unices is done via the PostScript language.  HP laser
printers usually support the PostScript language natively.  In the case of
printers that do not support PostScript natively (eg. Epson Deskjet whose
native language is PCL), you use ghostscript to convert the PostScript
generated by the application doing the printing into the printer's native
format.  GhostScript comes with many printer "drivers".  See the Printing
HOWOTO for a list of supported printers.

Anyways, the basic idea is PostScript.  There are many tools to manipulate
PostScript.  By using these tools you can print back-to-back (if your
printer supports it), n-up-ed (ie. more than one page of information per
page) output.

Here is what I do:

1. Printing plain text to a laser jet printer.

I use enscript (http://www.iki.fi/~mtr/genscript/) to pretty format my
plain text.  My /etc/enscript.cfg has the following lines:

# Pass following Page Device options to the generated output.
# 
# Duplex printing.
SetPageDevice: Duplex:true

this makes enscript generate back-to-back output.  I usually invoke
enscript like so:

$ enscript -2r -G -Pprinter_name foo.c

this will generate back-to-back, 2-uped output.

2. Printing from applications that generate PostScript (eg. Netscape).

You could use psnup which is part of the pstools package to manipulate
PostScript.  I have a hacked up version of pstools which has the added
ability to do back-to-back printing.  Grab it from
http://www.aunet.org/thaths/hacks/.  My print command for Netscape is
'psnup -c -n 2 -B | rlpr -Pprinter_name'

This produces 2-uped back-to-back output.

Thaths
- -- 
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 Baby, Welcome to Dumpsville.  Population: you.'" -- Homer J. Simpson
Sudhakar C13n http://people.netscape.com/thaths/ Lead Indentured Slave

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