Printing within Physics and Astronomy

There are two routes to paper, one via ‘our’ printers, and one via the Canon ‘pull printers’.

Local printers: generic information §

(or ‘school printers’)

The preferred way to use these is via CUPS. Different OSs have (maddeningly various) different ways of configuring this, but the key information is:

Use ‘Internet Printing Protocol’, or ‘IPP’.
The spool machine is spool.astro.gla.ac.uk
The ‘queue’ indicates which printer you want to print on from the list of available printers. See that link for the URL that you will need to supply; for example the room 615 printer is http://spool.astro.gla.ac.uk:631/printers/m451dn.
You may have to specify a printer driver – see the above link(s) for details of printer models. Generally, specifying ‘generic postscript’ is safe: you won't be able to specify bells and whistles such as stapling or colour handling, but this is probably quite robust.

How this information is massaged into the form required for your machine is unfortunately somewhat OS-dependent.

You can see the current list of CUPS jobs online.

It may be useful to search online for 'installing CUPS printer' or similar for platform-specific instructions.

Notes for other platforms or variants, or corrections or updates, or screenshots, would be appreciated.

Local printers: Linux §

You can set up printing from the command line (in this case to printer/queue cp4525), with

$ sudo lpadmin -p astro-printer -L "Room 614" -v ipp://spool.astro.gla.ac.uk/printers/cp4525
$ sudo lpadmin -d astro-printer   # set as the default printer
$ sudo cupsaccept astro-printer
$ sudo cupsenable astro-printer

Local printers: OS X §

Open ‘System Preferences’, and ‘Printers & Scanners’; click on the ‘+’ sign below the list of printers on the left, then click on ‘IP’. You should specify the ‘address’ as spool.astro.gla.ac.uk:631, and the ‘queue’ as printers/foo, where foo is the queue name from the printer list. For example, after setting up the room 615 printer, this window should look like this.

OS X seems to have a large number of printer drivers built-in, so that ‘Use’ and ‘Select Software...’ will allow you to identify a printer driver. See the printer list for the model numbers.

If you don't have the printer driver built in, then usually the `Generic PostScript Printer’ will work fine. If you have trouble, then you can find and install OS X printer drivers from Apple.

Local printers: Windows §

There are some instructions online for Windows 10.

Pull printers §

The ‘pull printers’ are the centrally-managed Canon printers. The model here is that you ‘print’ a document to a central service, and you can then go to any of these printers and retrieve (‘pull’) the print job to you, by logging in using your staff card.

The scheme, and instructions for installing the relevant drivers, are described on the IT Services page

These instructions appear to work either smoothly or not at all. If it doesn't work for you, an additional page has be set up catering to those printing from personal devices, that may provide further assistance.

These printers are also usable as photocopiers and as scanners (though with a hellish UI in the latter case).

Notes:

On OS X, when using the PrinterInstaller installer application, you should select ‘All Printers’ from the menu (as opposed to ‘CollegeofScienceandEngineering’), and tick the ‘PullPrint’ box. It is not clear to me why the hundreds of other cryptic entries are included in this list.
There were reports of problems when using the pull printers with OS X 10.11 (‘El Capitan’). As of December 2015 we believe these problems are resolved.

Pull printers and Linux §

The above method isn't supported on Linux (and assuming Unix) variants.

Instead, following the manual process on the Mobile Print site is required.

Once logged in, select 'Driver Print' and click on the Linux icon.

On the 'Configuring Driver Print on Linux' page, select 'Advanced (3)' and press Continue.

Select 'Linux SafeCom Mobile Print' under 'Advanced Driver Print' and follow the rest of the guide provided there. As noted in the documentation, ensure that you use the correct driver as if this isn't chosen, it could result in hundreds of erroneous garbled pages printing off.

As of writing, the printer model should be Canon IR-ADV C5235/5240 PPD, (make sure to check if this is still the case). If you don't have the driver installed, it can be downloaded directly from Open Printing.