20.4 Shell Print Using lpr -d

The precise command to print a DVI file depends on your system installation. Two common ones are ‘dvips foo.dvi -o’ and ‘lpr -d foo.dvi’.

For example, the following commands will (perhaps) suffice to sort the indices, format, and print the Bison Manual:

tex bison.texinfo
texindex bison.??
tex bison.texinfo
lpr -d bison.dvi

(Remember that the shell commands may be different at your site; but these are commonly used versions.)

Using the texi2dvi shell script (see the previous section):

texi2dvi bison.texinfo
lpr -d bison.dvi
# or perhaps dvips bison.dvi -o

lpr is a standard program on Unix systems, but it is usually absent on MS-DOS/MS-Windows. Some network packages come with a program named lpr, but these are usually limited to sending files to a print server over the network, and generally don't support the ‘-d’ option. If you are unfortunate enough to work on one of these systems, you have several alternative ways of printing DVI files:

• Find and install a Unix-like lpr program, or its clone. If you can do that, you will be able to print DVI files just like described above.
• Send the DVI files to a network printer queue for DVI files. Some network printers have special queues for printing DVI files. You should be able to set up your network software to send files to that queue. In some cases, the version of lpr which comes with your network software will have a special option to send a file to specific queues, like this:

  lpr -Qdvi -hprint.server.domain bison.dvi

• Convert the DVI file to a Postscript or PCL file and send it to your local printer. See (dvips)Invoking Dvips section `Invoking Dvips' in Dvips, and the man pages for dvilj, for detailed description of these tools. Once the DVI file is converted to the format your local printer understands directly, just send it to the appropriate port, usually ‘PRN’.