Print Smarter

This page and the "Print Smarter" signs in the Athena clusters are a joint project by the student group SAVE (Share A Vital Earth) and Information Services & Technology. For more information about this page and the signs, please email save-ist-printing at mit.edu.

General Printing Resources

Printing at MIT topic page, a comprehensive starting point for all kinds of printing questions and information
For help with any printing tasks on Athena or software support contact the Help Desk's Athena On-Line Consulting group via their web site or by phone at 617-253-4435
To report printer hardware problems with Athena printers or issues with supplies such as paper or toner you can also call our printer service group directly at 617-253-6367.

Print Double-Sided on Athena

From common programs

You can easily print double-sided directly from the File > Print menu of these common programs:

Adobe Reader	In the command line, type: `lpr -Pprintername2`
OpenOffice/StarOffice	In "Properties" select "long edge"
PDF Viewer	Pick "Generic Postscript", click "Configure", then "Duplex"
Mozilla Firefox	Select "Postscript/duplex" from the drop-down menu
MATLAB	Select the "duplex" option in the "appearance" tab

From the command line

You can also always print a document to a Postscript .ps file and the print the file from the command line. Both of the below commands will print the document in duplex (double-sided) mode on printers capable of doing so, and are basically equivalent. The second command is more general-purpose and may work in other Unix-based environments, not just on Athena. filetoprint.ps is the name of the Postscript file you are trying to print. Both commands are typed at the Athena command prompt (usually athena%).

lpr -Pprintername2 filetoprint.ps lpr -Zduplex -Pprintername filetoprint.ps

For more information

Eliminate Header Pages on Athena

To not print a header page

To not print a header page for a specific job add -h to the command line. The below command is typed at the Athena command prompt (usually athena%).

lpr -Pprintername2 -h filetoprint.ps

Custom header pages

Often header pages are useful for keeping print jobs separate on busy printers, and can be re-used as note paper. However, you might want to pick a specific design for your header page, such as graph paper or music staff paper. The below commands demonstrate how to pick specific header page designs if you do need to print header pages. The first command prints polar coordinate graph paper. The second command prints a sheet of music staff paper:

lpr -Zbanner=polar -Pprintername2 filetoprint.ps lpr -Zbanner=staff -Pprintername2 filetoprint.ps

For more information

Make It The Default

Customize your account to make it the default

You can change your default to always print double-sided and without a header page. Enter the following command at your Athena command prompt (usually athena%):

echo setenv LPROPT -hZduplex >> ~/.environment

What does this do? It adds the line setenv LPROPT -hZduplex to the configuration file .environment in your Athena home directory.

But what exactly does it do? The echo command just repeats what follows after it, and the >> portion of the command line tells Unix to append what comes before it to the file you specify immediately following the two greater-than signs, in this case the file .environment. The ~ character tells Unix to substitute the location of your home directory, and the / character is simply used to separate folder and file names as you type them on the command line.

Note: If you get an error message like this: /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/.../.environment: No such file or directory. it means that you do not have a .environment file. Use these commands instead. The touch command creates the file if it does not already exist.

touch ~/.environment echo setenv LPROPT -hZduplex >> ~/.environment

For more information

Manage Your Print Queue

Commands to manage your print queue

Run these commands from the Athena command prompt (usually athena%) after you have submitted print jobs or to find out about printer locations and status.

Command	Description
`cview printers`	Displays locations and printer queue summaries for all available printers.
`lpq` `lpr -Pprintername`	Checks your default printer's queue. You will see your own jobs listed, as well as jobs from other users. The optional `-Pprintername` argument shows the queue of a specific printer.
`lprm` `lprm -Pprintername`	Cancels all of your print jobs on the default printer. The optional `-Pprintername` argument cancels all of your print jobs on a specific printer.

Printers In This Athena Cluster

You can use the Athena command cview printers from any Athena machine to view a list of all public printers, their locations and names, their general status (up or down), and the number of jobs queued on each printer. You run this command from the Athena command prompt (usually athena%)

Download the PDF of the poster

print-smarter.pdf (513KB)