Running Linux, 5th Edition

Chapter 14. Printing

The paperless society has not yet come to pass, and it now seems more likely that we'll just move from conventional paper to electronic paper. Until that time comes, you'll need to communicate with many people by putting your computer documents on bleached dead trees.

Because many distributions set up printing for you, we start this chapter with an introduction to command-line utilities you can use for printing and printer control. Then we'll explain how to configure printing on both local and network printers, focusing on the simple and powerful Common Unix Printing System (CUPS ).

Printing

Linux provides various user-level printing options. Traditionally, tools such as the text-mode lpr have been used to print files from the command line. Understanding how to use these and other printing and document formatting commands will enable you to print documents quickly and efficiently. A quick rundown of the enscript and nenscript utilities will help you create good-looking printouts even from basic text documents. GUI programs present their own user interfaces that you can use to control printing options from such programs. Finally, we describe some of the mechanics behind the printing system. This will help you to manage your printing sessions by giving you an understanding of how it all works, enabling you to use the system to its best effect.

Basic Linux Printing Commands

The lpr command prints a document in Linux. You might not always invoke this command directly—you ...