Some general tips on printing and troubleshooting printing problems

  Try to send output of programs to a file instead of directly to a printer. This

will allow you to check the printout with gs and ghostview before printing or in the event of a print failure.

  Conserve trees where you can. When printing a document from a PC or a Mac to the 

main research printer csb2052, make sure that duplex printing is turned on; most PC and Mac drivers leave it off by default. When reprinting a large document, reprint only those pages that changed, if possible.

  Even if a file previews fine with gs or ghostview, there may be problems 

printing, especially if the file came from a Mac, PC or via the Internet. Check the file in a text editor - there may be extra lines or characters before the beginning of the Postscript file (which always starts with a line beginning with “%!PS”). If there are extra characters, this will cause the printer to believe that its input is a plain text file and it will print it as such. Remove the extra characters in a text editor and the printer should recognize the file correctly.

  Printers generate a header page for every job that is printed. An easy way to 

avoid printing extra header pages when printing multiple files is to batch them together. For example:

  lpr foo1
  lpr foo2
  lpr foo3
  a
  would generate three header pages, while
  lpr foo1 foo2 foo3
  would generate one.