There are two ways to print multiple pages of a document on a single
sheet of paper.  The first way applies to PostScript documents, which
can be generated by just about every application on Athena.

The program used to do this is called "psnup".  You can view its
documentation with this command:

        man psnup

Essentially, you give the program the number of pages you want to fit
on one printed page, and it will automatically determine an acceptable
layout.  You would probably want something like this:

	psnup -2 filename.ps | lpr -Pajax

to print two pages per printed page to the ajax printer.

You can replace 2 with the number of pages you wish to fit on one
page.  psnup will automatically rotate pages as appropriate, and
calculate the number of rows and columns per page based on the number
you give it.  If you give it 4, for example, it will give you a 2x2
layout, and if you tell it 12, it will give you a 3x4 layout.  On the
other hand, if you tell it 5, you'll get an error message, since
there's no good way to fit 5 pages on one printed page.  Most users
find that "4" or "6" is the maximum number they can specify and still
easily read the pages of a typical document.  When combined with
double-sided (duplex) printing, you can fit up to 8 or 12 pages of a
document on a single sheet of paper.  This goes a long way towards
saving paper.

Note that unlike lpr and enscript, psnup sends its output to stdout,
so you need to use a pipe ("|") to send the output to a printer.  To
preview the output before printing, you can do:

	psnup -2 filename.ps > /tmp/output.ps
	gv /tmp/output.ps

For the best results, read the man page and decide what works best for
you.


For plain text files, you can use the enscript program.  It works very
similar to the standard lpr command, except you can use the "-2r"
option to place 2 pages of text per page, in landscape mode, like so:

	enscript -2r -Pprinter filename

For more information about this command, type

	man enscript

at your athena% prompt.  Note, this will ONLY work on text, and NOT
PostScript files.  


Last updated: $Date: 2004/03/10 21:35:04 $