The Printing HOWTO

Grant Taylor



Dirk Allaert



v1.8, 2003-06-22

This is the Printing HOWTO, a collection of information on how to generate, preview, print and fax anything under GNU/Linux. Almost everything applies equally well to free software users using other Unix-like operating systems.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Terminology
1.2. History
1.3. Copyright
2. Quick Start
2.1. Where to Get Help
3. How to print
3.1. With BSD LPD and the lpr command
3.2. With System V LPD and the lp command
3.3. With CUPS
3.4. GUI Printing Tools
4. Kernel printer devices
4.1. The lp device (kernels <=2.1.32)
4.2. The parport device (kernels >= 2.1.33)
4.3. Serial devices
4.4. USB Devices
5. Supported Printers
5.1. Postscript
5.2. Non-Postscript
5.3. What printers work?
5.4. How to buy a printer
6. Spooling software
6.1. CUPS
6.2. LPD
6.3. LPRng
6.4. PPR
6.5. Others
7. How it all works
7.1. CUPS
7.2. LPD
8. How to set things up
8.1. Configuring CUPS
8.2. Configuring LPD
8.3. Large Installations
8.4. Accounting
9. Vendor Solutions
9.1. Red Hat
9.2. Debian
9.3. SuSE
9.4. Caldera
9.5. Corel
9.6. Mandrake
9.7. Slackware
9.8. Other Distributions
10. Ghostscript.
10.1. Invoking Ghostscript
10.2. Ghostscript output tuning
11. Networks
11.1. Printing to a Unix/lpd host
11.2. Printing to a Windows or Samba printer
11.3. Printing to a NetWare Printer
11.4. Printing to an EtherTalk (Apple) printer
11.5. Printing to a networked printer
11.6. Running an if for remote printers with old LPDs
11.7. From Windows.
11.8. From an Apple.
11.9. From Netware.
11.10. Networked Printer Administration
12. Windows-only printers
12.1. The Ghostscript Windows redirector
12.2. HP Winprinters
12.3. Lexmark Winprinters
13. How to print to a fax machine.
13.1. Using a faxmodem
13.2. Using the Remote Printing Service
13.3. Commercial Faxing Services
14. How to generate something worth printing.
14.1. Markup languages
14.2. WYSIWYG Word Processors
15. Printing Photographs
15.1. Ghostscript and Photos
15.2. Paper
15.3. Printer Settings
15.4. Print Durability
15.5. Shareware and Commercial Software
16. On-screen previewing of printable things.
16.1. PostScript
16.2. TeX dvi
16.3. Adobe PDF
17. Serial printers under lpd
17.1. Setting up in printcap
17.2. Older serial printers that drop characters
18. What's missing?
18.1. Plumbing
18.2. Fonts
18.3. Drivers
19. Credits
A. GNU Free Documentation License
A.1. PREAMBLE
A.2. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
A.3. VERBATIM COPYING
A.4. COPYING IN QUANTITY
A.5. MODIFICATIONS
A.6. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
A.7. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
A.8. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A.9. TRANSLATION
A.10. TERMINATION
A.11. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
A.12. ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
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