Printing

Departmental printers can be accessed via our print server print.cs.brown.edu. You can access this print server from any departmental network, or wirelessly when connected through the CS VPN.  It hosts a variety of print queues for all the department network printers. See the printing policy for usage limitations.

Bonjour/DNS Available Printers

Most Apple products will detect printers that are shared to the network using mDNS packets that adhere to the Bonjour standard.  Those network packets provide details about the devices available on the network, for easy installation or access.  In accordance with this feature we offer the following printers, which show up automatically when a host is wired to our network or connected to our VPN.

BW1 C4
BW2 C4HQ
BW2-205 C5
BW3 CCMB-C2-243
BW4 CCMB-C2-247
BW5 CLF4HQ
C3 SciLi-BW

*For WIndows users, the names above should be used with "_windows" add.  i.e. c4_windows

When adding an auto-discovered printer it is important to note that capitalization and the name itself must be identical to the list above.  If you do not see a printer that is listed above or the name is in any way different form that list, please visit the printer page on our cups server to get the official list of printers being offered by our server. (https://print.cs.brown.edu:631/printers/)

Printing in the Sunlab

See the Printing in the Sunlab page for more information.

Tstaff Managed Systems

All managed department machines are configured to use the internal print server.  No user configuration is required.

Linux

As with many things in Linux, there are quite a few printing commands. Some of the most important are:

Viewing the current jobs in a Linux print queue

You can view the current jobs in a Linux print queue by running:

lpq -P<print queue>, where <print queue> is the name of the queue (e.g. bw4).

The command will return something similar to:

bw4 is ready and printing
Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size
active esatoh 373926 smbprn.00001934 https://library 76622848 bytes
1st esatoh 373927 smbprn.00001935 https://library 21590016 bytes

Windows

In Windows, most programs let you print from the File-Print menu of that application.  To see the list of printers, go to the Start Menu, select Control Panels, and then Devices & Printers. All printers are available except for the clf4hq printer.

Self Managed Systems

Printer Mapping Instruction for Self Managed System or over Wireless network

Windows
*Please only use printer names ending in "_windows". i.e. c4_windows

Mac OS X
*HP driver pack for Mac OS Mavericks and newer can be found here: https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1888

Linux

Other Printing Issues

If you encounter a physical problem with a printer (jammed, out of toner or ink, etc) and have not been ``trained'' in how to fix the problem, please do not try to guess your way through. Use the problem facility to report the trouble, or ask a Tstaff member or one of those friendly veteran grad students. They'll show you how to fix it for the next time. Be especially hesitant to mess with the color printers.

If your printout is on the wrong type of paper

Occasionally, if you specify a certain type of paper and that tray is empty, the printer will automatically default to a different paper tray.

If your printout ends up printed on a different type of paper than you expected, you might want to check the paper trays and make sure none of them are empty.

How to print an A4 sized PostScript file

Our printers print only on US Letter sized paper. Most European countries print on A4 sized paper, which is taller and narrower. Electronic documents formatted for A4 often will not print properly, or at all, on our printers.

When printing an A4 document from a browser or application on any platform, it will be helpful to preview it and, if necessary, to scale it down before sending the job to the printer.

The easiest way around this is to transform the A4-size document into a Letter-size document before printing it. How you do this depends on the format the document is in. If, for example, the document is a Framemaker document, you may find it easiest to reformat the document in Framemaker. The same goes for Microsoft Word, or Acrobat or many other document formats.

How to print an A4 sized PostScript file in Linux

In Linux, you can reformat any A4 postscript document using the following simple command. Most desktop publishing applications let you save a document as PostScript, usually from the Print menu. If the document is already in PostScript format, or if you cannot reformat it in some other way, try this.

Let's say our A4 document is called euro.ps:

       % mpage -1o euro.ps> amer.ps

       % lpr amer.ps


The resulting file, amer.ps, is in US Letter format.