Linux Printing Hacks

This is a tip sent by WebUpd8 reader Bruce Ingalls.

Do your color Open Office documents print out as Black & White? Convert them to PDF first, then print them using Evince (the default Gnome PDF viewer).

Are your PDF documents with over 50 pages not finishing, and overwhelming your printer? If you don't have access to the source, to break up your pdf file into chunks (say, 20 pages at a time), you can print faster and lighter, by converting to a PostScript file:

pdf2ps in.pdf out.ps

This works best with postscript printers. Note that postscript files are much larger, so you might want to use bzcat.

If this still overwhelms your printer, you can split your postscript with

psselect

These postscript utilities are part of the psutils package. In Ubuntu, install it with:

sudo apt-get install psutils

The pdfutils package is similar, but has many more dependent packages.

Bonus: if you print your source code on dead trees, take a look at a2ps:

sudo apt-get install a2ps

This is a guest post by Bruce Ingalls (thank you!). Browse all of his posts.