Printing Lecture Slides

Q: How do I print the lecture slides?

A: Ever wanted to print slides with 2 faces up? 4 faces up? How about 8 faces up? Would you believe 16 faces up? With the incredible psnup, you can enjoy eye strain, and a smaller stack of printouts.

1) Open your favorite Windows program. If you downloaded the lecture slides in PowerPoint format, you can open them in Office 97 PowerPoint, for example. But any program capable of printing to postscript will work.

2) Click on the "File..." menu option.

3) Select "Print..."

4) In the dialog box, select "Print to File".

5) Make sure you have PostScript Type I selected; this option is usually on by default; it might be buried below a tab menu or two. Find it? Just make sure you're not using MS-postscript.

6) Make sure you have a PostScript-capable printer selected. More details on this particular step are available from OIT:

http://www.oit.gatech.edu/cs/csc/faq/0230.html

7) Print the document to a file. This should create a rather bloated file with a ".ps" extension.

8) Use ftp to transfer the file to your acme account. This will probably put you over quota, so we have to delete this file later. It might be a good idea to *already* be logged into your account from another terminal. That way, you dodge the 'restricted shell' once more.

9) Now, this Postscript file is usually just one slide per page. What if you wanted two pages printed on a page? You could use "psnup", a Unix utility found on most professionally maintained Unix machines.

10) Well, I couldn't find psnup on acme, so I added it to a folder. You can run it from ~cs1312/bin/psnup. You need to provide the number of pages after a -n switch, followed by the source file, and pipe the output to another file.

11) How? Well, suppose we had a file called "LectureSlides.ps", and wanted to print them with four slides on a page. We could type:

~cs1312/bin/psnup -n4 LectureSlides.ps > FourUpSlides.ps

This line means "Run the file called 'psnup', and please give me four pages shrunk to fit onto one page; the source is called 'LectureSlides.ps', and I'd like the output file to be called 'FourUpSlides.ps', and I'd like a biggie fries and a large coke with that, too." Unix will happily compily with most of this command.

12) What? You wanted 16 pages on a page? You're nuts. But you could have typed instead:

~cs1312/bin/psnup -n16 LectureSlides.ps > SixteenUpSlides.ps

Now much would you pay for the amazing psnup utility? But that's not all! You can change the page number to 2, 4, 8, or 16 (think about why for a second...), and adjust the file names as needed!

13) Ready to print? Remember, your output is a different file name. So type:

prnt -dest central-ps -type ps FourUpSlides.ps

or whatever command options you need. More options available at:

http://www.oit.gatech.edu/cs/csc/faq/0232.html

14) Delete those big files. Your quota will thank you.

15) Still curious? You can run psnup with a "--help" option for more hints. Really bored? Look for /usr/local/bin/ps2ascii, /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf, and my personal favorite: /usr/local/bin/ps2ps.