Printing files to paper from pangea

Last revision July 22, 2004

Please note that the commands described in these pages may differ slightly on other variants of Unix.

Other Unix computers can route print jobs through pangea. If the printer you want is not currently accessible from a research group machine, have your group system manager contact the pangea system manager to set up printing through pangea.

The Unix printing system is controlled by a "line printer daemon", that controls access to the physical printer devices. Users submit files to be printed with the lpr command or other programs that call lpr internally. The file is copied to a spooling area and placed in a first-in-first-out queue, to be printed as the printer becomes available.

Each printer on the system has an entry in the system file /etc/printcap describing how the system can send files to it and also which filter programs should be used to translate files into a format that the printer can understand.

On pangea, we do not do any "automatic" format translations in the printer queues. Our printers understand only plain text or PostScript. If you have a file in a different format, you must first run a translation program yourself to make a version in plain text or PostScript, and then send that converted version to the printer.

If pangea cannot find a printer on the network, or has other problems connecting to a printer, it will eventually give up and delete the printing job after one week.

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