Printing in the Biostatistics Department

There are two printers available in the computing lab and one in the copyroom. You can send files to these printers from the command line on hsph using lpr.

All three of these printers are installed on the computer lab and library machines. To install on personal machines and/or student office machines, you'll need to add them using the following protocol:

Adding printers in Windows

The following will guide you through setting up your new laptops/desktops to print to the department printers (414, skittles, and copy room) as well as any other network printer. You can also find instruction here for Windows XP in more details.

Click "Start" on the lower left of your screen, select "Control Panel" and then double-click "Printers and Faxes".

Double click the "Add Printer" icon (or go to "File" -> "Add Printer"), which will take you through the rest of the process.

In "Local or network printer" panel, select "Local printer attached to this computer". Make sure "Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printer" is unchecked.

When you are asked which port to use, select the option for creating a new port, and select TCP/IP.

At this stage, a new menu should start up to continue the process. This is where you enter the IP address of the printer and a name for the printer.

You then are asked something about the printer type; these are all HP printers and the driver types are listed below.

Skipping some details, that should be it.

The following is a list of the names/types/addresses for the three printers in the Biostat lab. You will need the IP address which can be found on each printer. For security reason, we do not post the IP addresses here.

In order to add a printer that is not on the list, have someone else print a test page. This page will contain the information you require (i.e. IP Address).

To default to double-sided printing, right click on the printer in "Printers and Faxes" panel, then go to Properties->Device settings. Under "Installable Options", set "Duplex Unit" to "Installed". Note Skittles only support single-sided printing.

Important reminders:

You'll do this process once for each printer you want to add.

You are adding a local printer, so you do not need to auto-detect for a plug-and-play printer.

Unix Printing:

Your default printer is rm414. You can printer to other printers using the command line switch -P with lpr. For example, to print a postscript file (filename.ps) to the color printer, type the following at the command prompt:

lpr -Pskittles filename.ps

For a double-sided color printout:

lpr -Pskittlesd filename.ps

If you want to change your default printer, add the following line to your .cshrc file:

setenv PRINTER printername

For example, if your office is in the lower level, you may want to change your default printer to dungeon with

setenv PRINTER dungeon.

The only files you can print using lpr are postscript and text files. Do NOT try to print pdf, doc, xls, gif or any other types of files using lpr directly. It will result in piles of garbage!!!

A few other useful printing tips:

To print an MS Office document, you can try staroffice (soffice) on hsph, or you can ftp your file to a PC in the biostatistics computing lab and print it using MS Office.

To convert a text file to postscript for nice formatting:
(this will produce a double-column, double sided output in landscape mode. Very useful for looking at large listings. You are getting 4 pages of listing in one sheet.)

$enscript -2r mysas.lst

For more information on enscript, please do "man enscript" at the UNIX prompt.

To print a pdf file from the command line:

cat file.pdf | acroread -toPostScript | lpr

To print to another printer from Netscape:

 (default: rm414)

last updated: 09-16-2008