Printing at the institute
All printers of the institute are managed centrally. Before a print is sent to a printer, the system gets the page number and job settings, calculates the costs and checks permissions and credits for the sender. After a successful printing, the credits will be subtracted.
Credits and free printing | black and white | colored |
members of the institute* | free | free** |
students*** |
* Members of the institute are: Professors, Staff, Assistants (PostDocs and PhDs), Guests.
** Assistants need to refill the credit (for free) after printing 100 colored pages per semester.
*** Students with 'Hauptfach Mathematik' get a free refund of 10 SFr. per semester automatically.
A printjob is counted based on page number, page format (A4 or A3), duplex or no duplex and color. Special settings like A3, duplex or color are only available on some special printers like g28, h52, j11, jcolor, k49, k and k49color.
Charging Credit
You can view your credit, your settings and your last 50 print jobs in your account admin panel: www.math.uzh.ch/my.
Students can charge credits in 27-J-40. The credit can be used immediately.
Assistants (PostDocs and PhDs) can come to J40 for charging credits for free. They can also write an email to the system support, but in this case probably has to wait some time until the credit is loaded up.
Printing on Group-Accounts
People, who are assigned to a group (made by the IT), can print on this group account. All members of the group have a link on the my Homepage, where they can see the Print-History of the group.
For printing on a group account, a job-billing information has to be sent with the print job. In many print dialogs (for example: Firefox) you have in the tab 'Job' in the section 'Job Details' a field 'Billing info'. There you must enter the group name (all lowercase) to print on the group account. In other print dialogs (especially the gtklp dialog) you have in the tab 'Special' the field 'Extra Options'. There you must type: job-billing=<group> where '<group>' is again the lowercase group name you wish to print on. On a console (with lp command) you can use the option -o job-billing=<group> for printing on a group account.
If you have problems with printing on a group account, please come to J40.
Printing via Console
| Description | Syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
| List of all printer | lpstat -a | > lpstat -a |
| Show default printer | lpstat -d | > lpstat -d system default destination: k |
| Set up default printer | lpoptions -d <printer> | > lpoptions -d k |
| lp [-d <printer>] <file> | > lp paper.pdf > lp -d h52 paper.pdf |
|
| Printing n copies | lp -n <number> <file> | > lp -n 5 paper.pdf |
| Printing n copies in the order 1,2,3... 1,2,3 ....1,2,3 (rather than 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3) | lp -o Collate=True <file> | > lp -n 5 -o Collate=True paper.pdf |
| Print two sides on one page | lp -o number-up=2 <file> | > lp -o number-up=2 paper.pdf |
| Printing one sided on a duplex printer | lp -o duplex=None <file> | > lp -o duplex=None paper.pdf |
| Printing duplex with turning on short edge | lp -o duplex=DuplexTumble <file> | > lp -o duplex=DuplexTumble paper.pdf |
| Printing transparencies | lp -o media=Transparency <file> | > lp -o media=Transparency paper.pdf this selects tray 1 (if available) |
Show printer queue, cancel job
Description | Syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
Show printing queue on terminal | lpstat -o | lpstat -o |
Killing a print job | cancel <job-nr> | cancel k-12345 |
Note: there are several print server (for load balancing and fail over). Every machine (terminal server, print server, ...) has it's own local print queues. During the printing process, every print job will be transferred from the local server to the print server to the printer. Until the job is completely transferred, the job remains visible in the print queue. After transfering, the job diasappears on the local print queue.
To delete a job, which is not visible in the local queue anymore, you need to log on the print server - typically you don't have the rights to do this.
Printing at VPP (ETHZ)
Short statement about network printing
Samba manual: "Network printing is one of the most complicated and error-prone day-to-day tasks any user or administrator may encounter. This is true for all OS platforms. And there are reasons for this.
You can't expect most file formats to just throw them toward printers and they get printed. There needs to be a file format conversion in between. The problem is that there is no common standard for print file formats across all manufacturers and printer types. While PostScript (trademark held by Adobe) and, to an extent, PCL (trademark held by HP) have developed into semi-official "standards" by being the most widely used PDLs Page Description Languages (PDLs), there are still many manufacturers who "roll their own" (their reasons may be unacceptable license fees for using printer-embedded PostScript interpreters, and so on). "