V22.0201.002 (Fall 97)

### V22.0201.002, Machine Organization I, Fall 97
PRINTING POSTSCRIPT

I have collected below some of your emails about how you go about printing postscript files.

See FAQs for information about postscript files.

Basically, every NYU student has access to a UNIX account through their email account at ACF (usually on machines named ``IS*.ACF.NYU.EDU''). When you enter this account, you initially encounter a "mail shell" that assumes that you wish to do email. But you can get access to other services as well. For one thing, you can escape from the "mail shell" by typing "!" (exclamation mark, or "bang", as they call this in computer science). Once you are in unix, you can send your file to any selected printer by typing at the unix prompt

lpr -P<printer-name> <filename>
The <filename> can be your postscript file. Note there is no space between "-P" and <printer-name>. You need to find out the name of a printer that is capable of printing postscript files and which is physically near to you (ask the lab assistants). For the PC lab in Tisch Hall Basement, the postscript printers are called th_hp3si_1 and th_hp4si_1. For 14 Washington Place, it is called wp_hp3si_1 (but you need to pick up the output from wp_hp5si_1 because they are apparently in the process of renaming the printer! Clearly this information (10/15/97) may change in the near future.)

Of course, there are lots of other things you can do within UNIX (e.g, "ls" will list your files and "man ls" will give you help on the ls command). To get back to your "mail shell", you can type "exit" at the unix prompt.

### OTHER HINTS

- If you are on a PC, you can do telnet to get to your NYU UNIX.
- When you are in your UNIX account, you can ftp to the site where I store the postscript files. Alternatively, you can try to use NETSCAPE to access the class page to download the file. (Type "ftp ", etc).
- If you have other netscape sessions running that you forgot to kill, you will have problems starting netscape. If you are in the PC lab, You can kill the other sessions using the command "killothersessions".
- If you wish to install your own postscript printing software, www.windows95.com contains some shareware utilities. One is called ghostview for windows. Ghostview is the user interface and it depends on ghostscript, an interpreter for postscript that is also available for Windows. Besides viewing postscript files, it can also print. If you are in your UNIX account, you can get the online manual page by typing ``man ghostview''. At the www.windows95.com site, do a search on ``postscript'' to get a complete listing of what is available.
- If you have trouble downloading your postscript file, as a last resort, I can email them to you. You then save them in your UNIX account and print them as described above.

    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 17:58:30 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Ruhiny
    To: Chee Yap

    Professor Yap,

    	You can upload the file to your own email account, and use the
    "lpr" print command to print it, i have no trouble printing it.  Just want
    to let you know.

    	Thank you for your time.

    Ruhiny

    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 17:54:56 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Michael Hom
    To: yap@cs.nyu.edu
    Subject: postscript viewer

    Professor Yap:
    	I discovered an alternate method to view the postscript files.  If
    everyone could go to http://www.windows95.com and go to the "search" page,
    enter postscript.  Choose the first hyperlink to "Imaging and OCR tools."
    Scroll down until you see "RoPS 32"  It is a shareware postscript viewer.
    It will work on windows 3.1 and win95.
    	This program allows the user to view the PS file (similar to a PDF
    file).  However, printing is not very good.  The program allows you to
    copy the text of the image (OCR about 85-90 percent accuracy).  You can
    then paste the text into any text editor (Notepad, MS Word, etc...).
    Then, just print from there on.  It's not perfect, but it's pretty close.
    	Professor Yap, would you consider putting the assignments in HTML
    format so that everyone would be able to view and then print the file with
    ease?

    Thank you.

    **************************
                Michael Hom
      E-mail:   mh204@is5.nyu.edu
    Home Page:  http://pages.nyu.edu/~mh204  (   NEW & IMPROVED!!!  )

    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 17:45:17 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Wai-Hang Lam
    To: Wai K Lam
    Cc: v22_0201_002_fl97@cs.nyu.edu
    Subject: Re: assignment 1 and printing problems

    On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Wai K Lam wrote:

    > I have printed the homework successfully at the Tisch Hall LC lab.  You
    > need to send the postscript file to printer th_hp4si_1 for it to work.  It
    > is the only printer that I know of that can actually print it.  You need
    > to download the file into your unix account and print it from there.
    >
    > Wai K. Lam
    >
    I've just try to print the file in the lab at Tisch Hall.

    Both th_hp4si_1 & th_hp3si_1 work.

    For those who don't know:

    - For IS accounts, to select a printer go to "ACCOUNT" --> "ENVIRONMENT"
    from the main menu.

    - To print a file, go to "FILES" --> "PRINT" from the main menu and type
    in the file you want to print out.

    Hope this helps,

    Jackie

    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 17:12:06 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Kristjan Varnik
    To: Chee Yap
    Subject: Re: assignment 1 and printing problems

    On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Chee Yap wrote:

    > I discovered that the acf labs are not
    > capable (at present) to handle postscript
    > files, but they will try to work on a solution.
    >
    you can print the ps file in the washington place labs
    using lpr, they recently installed the driver or whatever