Tips And Tricks II

Printing

If you want to print on both sides of the sheet, but you have no duplex unit, you can do that nevertheless, though not completely automated. First you print only the odd pages, then you turn over the package of printed pages and put it back into the paper tray of the printer. Now you send the even pages to the printer and they get printed on the reverse sides. Be sure that you insert the printed odd pages correctly, if in doubt, do a test with the first two pages of the document.

In 'xpp', you can use the "Page set" option on the "Basic" tab of the "Options" dialog, in 'qtcups', the appropriate option is in the lower right corner of the main window, and on the command line you enter:

lpr -p [printer] -o page-set=odd [filename]
lpr -p [printer] -o page-set=even [filename]

Note: Not all printers are suitable for double-sided printing. On some laser printers the fixing unit melts the toner at the already printed back side which leads to dirty rolls in the printer and so to dirt on the following pages. Laser printers for which a duplex unit is available should not have this problem. On ink-jet printers the ink can bleed through the paper and thus text in a region of the page where there is a rather dark image on the reverse side can be difficult to read.

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Clones of "original" printers have compatible languages but often different imaginable areas (the area of the sheet on which the printer can print) than the original printer. Because the borders of the imaginable area are set as the default margins for plain text printing, the text on a printer with a different imaginable area can be cut off at the borders. There are even some printers where all the default text margins are set to zero, which always leads to some part of the text being cut off.

To circumvent this problem you can set the text margins manually. See the "text" tab of the options dialog of 'xpp' or of the "Properties" dialog of 'qtcups'. Save the settings and you always have correct text printouts. Or better yet, run 'xpp' or 'qtcups' as 'root' to apply the margin settings system-wide.

Most applications send data to print as PostScript, so when text borders are cut off when printing from an application, you should adjust the margins inside the application.

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Did it sometimes happen to you that you tried to print from an application and you got empty pages, nothing, or PostScript error messages?

This is not always a problem of the printer driver, sometimes the application produces broken PostScript which GhostScript, CUPS, or the printer-internal PostScript interpreter cannot render. To check this, you can try to preview the PostScript file produced by the application with 'gv'. Let the application print to a file and display the file with

gv [filename] &

If there is no possibility to print into a file, use gv or gv - (one of these should work) as the printing command.

If the file is displayed correctly in 'gv', the PostScript is OK and there's a problem with the printer driver. Otherwise the problem is somewhere in the application.

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Acrobat Reader

'Acrobat Reader', the principal program for displaying PDF files, sometimes produces broken PostScript, which cannot be printed or displayed by gv. In this case (or also when your printer or driver does not support the higher PostScript levels), you should first try to choose a lower PostScript level in the printing dialog of 'Acrobat Reader'. If this doesn't help, try to use 'xpdf' to print the file or send the PDF file to the printer by entering one of the following commands on the command line

xpp [filename]
qtcups [filename]
lpr -p [printer] [filename]

or by dragging the file icon from 'Konqueror' to the printer icon on the KDE desktop with your mouse.

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Using a color ink-jet when the colored ink is empty is no problem, with CUPS you can easily switch to gray-scale printing - but did you know that you can still print when the black ink is empty?

The simplest method (for the GIMP-Print GhostScript driver "Foomatic + stp-4.0" or perhaps also other drivers with adjustable color intensities) is to adjust one of the primary colors to zero, so that you get the complementary color instead of black (yellow off leads to blue).

A more sophisticated method is feasible using the native CUPS drivers of GIMP-Print ("CUPS + GIMP-print v4.0"): Start the color calibration program calibrate-gimpprint and do the usual calibration. In the first step you are asked for the black level. You see some black squares (which are black mixed out of yellow, magenta, and cyan). Choose the darkest one. Note that where they get lighter to the left, pure black is missing, so do not choose the one on the straight left. You won't see the numbers in the color squares in this first calibration step, because they are printed in pure black. The most right square is "0", the second is "1", and so on up to "9", after "9" comes "A" to "F". So for black you will choose something like "B" or "C". The next steps of the calibration you do as usual, and in these steps the numbers will be readable because it uses the results of the first step.

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