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Printer Specific Features

The CS Department's new HPIIIsi, and EE's existing HPIIId, laser printer have two features which can be accessed from the various printing programs.

The first feature is duplex (or double-sided) printing. A component of this is a feature called tumbling, which involves rotating the second side 180 degrees. This is used when for output which is rotated (landscape mode). `lw2' is set to print duplex by default.

The second feature is the ability to select paper trays. By default, the printer will use the upper paper tray, the lower tray may contain special paper (i.e. letterhead). We do not (yet) have an envelope feeder tray.

All of the options may be selected by post-processing your postscript code with the program psmod. Read the man page for full information.

What follows are examples of how to use psmod with most applications. Only the necessary options are shown.

enscript -p- file | psmod | lpr -Pprinter
mpage -P file | psmod | lpr -Pprinter
groff file | psmod | lpr -Pprinter
psroff -t file | psmod | lpr -Pprinter
dvips -f file.dvi | psmod | lpr -Pprinter
psmod file.ps | lpr -Pprinter

If you want to manually add these options to a PostScript file, You can use psmod to tell you what to add to the file. The following command will print out the necessary PostScript code.

echo %! | psmod

With groff and TeX, these printer options may be selected within your document. This may be useful if you want to change options on the fly.

In groff the local macro package `-mhp' supplies macros for changing these printer options. To select duplex mode use the `.duplex-mode' macro. An argument of `tumble' can be given to to that macro turn on tumbling. From the command line, the argument of `-dduplex=1' will enable duplex printing, and `-dtumble=1' will enable tumbling. To select a certain paper tray use the `.papertray' macro, with an argument of `lower', `upper' or `envelope'. From the command line, the argument of `-dtray=tray-name' will select the corresponding paper tray.

For TeX, there is a local set of macros in `/usr/local/lib/tex/inputs/local/hp.sty' which can activate the printers special features.

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