2.7 Printing Documents

The page layout determines how a document is sent to the printer or saved as PostScript. See section 2.10 for the commands which determine the page layout. When a document is printed or saved as PostScript, each page that contains a part of the drawing is printed respectively saved. The Print menu  contains the following entries:

•   Print (<Ctrl+P>). You can send the drawing directly to a PostScript printer with this command . The default printer is the value of the PRINTER environment variable. When this variable is not set, the printer name in the TCM configuration file $HOME/.tcmrc or $TCM_HOME/lib/tcm.conf is used instead. In the Printer Options submenu you can see and modify the printer settings that are used and in the Page menu you can change the page layout. In general, the drawing is printed exactly as it is displayed in the drawing area. For seeing what is exactly sent to the printer you can issue the Show Preview command from the same menu.
•     Export (<Ctrl+E>). This pops up a file selection dialog for saving the picture to some graphics format. Currently, you can save as plain PostScript (the same as what is sent directly to the printer) or as Encapsulated PostScript (EPSF). EPSF is a format that is more suitable than plain PostScript for including drawings into L^ATEX or Troff documents. In the dialog there is an option menu called ``Format for exported document'', in which you can set the intended output format. In the dialog box a default export file name is already filled in. This is the document name with suffix .ps or .eps. If you attempt to overwrite an existing file, it pops up a dialog from which you can cancel the operation. Furthermore, when you have dismissed the dialog, the last visited directory in this dialog is remembered as well as the last chosen output format in the option menu.
•     Show Preview. Starts up an external PostScript viewer, for previewing the document as it would be printed. Hopefully this command saves some trees. By default, TCM uses the external PostScript viewer program ghostview. But you can define a different default viewer in the TCM configuration file or set temporarily a PostScript viewer in the Preview Command dialog from the Printer Options submenu.
•   Printer Queue. Use this option to see the printer queue of the current printer in a pop-up window. By clicking on a line in the queue you select a print job. The Remove button tries to remove the selected job from the queue. Update redisplays the current queue. Dismiss removes the window. TCM uses external Unix programs for the printer queue. If it cannot find the right programs, it warns that the queue cannot be viewed or that jobs cannot be removed. The external Unix programs that are used can be changed temporarily in the Printer Options submenu or more permanently in the TCM configuration file.
•   Printer Options. This is a menu that contains some options for the printer. The default values are read from the file $HOME/.tcmrc (if it exists) or from $TCM_HOME/lib/tcm.conf otherwise. In the Printer Options menu these values can be changed temporarily i.e. only during the lifetime of the editor. If you want to save the changed options, you have to edit the TCM configuration file. The TCM configuration file is only read when an editor is started.
  •   Printer Name. Use this to change the printer name. The default printer is the value of the PRINTER environment variable. When PRINTER is not set, the value from the TCM configuration file is used instead.
  •   Number of Copies. Use this to change the number of copies that will be print. The default is 1. Change the setting by moving the little slider from left to right. If the number of copies is greater than one then for each time you print one single print job is generated and often the printing will go faster then when you send separate copies.
  •   Print Command. The default print command is read from the TCM configuration file. The TCM configuration file contains the default print command of the specific Unix variant.
  •   Printer Queue Command. The default command for showing the printer queue is read from the TCM configuration file. The TCM configuration file contains the printer queue command of the specific Unix variant.
  •   Printer Remove Command. The default command for removing a job from the printer queue is read from the TCM configuration file. The TCM configuration file contains a command of the specific Unix variant.
  •   Preview Command. The default command for previewing the PostScript document is read from the TCM configuration file. The TCM configuration file contains the option PreviewCommand which has by default the value "/usr/local/bin/ghostview", but other PostScript viewers like pageview or xpsview should work as well.
  •   Print Duplex Pages. Causes the output to be printed in duplex mode, i.e. pages are printed two-sided if the printer supports that. The binding is as if the resultant pages are to be bound together with their leftmost edge.
  •   Print Tumbled Pages. This option is only useful with the Duplex option on. It causes the ``backside'' pages to be flipped relative to the front side pages.
  •   Print Extra Banner Page. An (extra) PostScript banner page will be printed in front of the printed document. The banner page contains the document name, the current date and the login name of the user. This is useful when the printer does not print banners or when you think that this banner is cool.