Printing with CUPS

After you have set up your printer, printing is an easy chore from the user's standpoint. In most cases, you'll just click Print (Ctrl+P) from your application, bring up the print dialog box, and accept the defaults. You have many choices, however, when that dialog box appears.

Take a look at Figure 7.9. It is the Print dialog box in the Konqueror web browser, but the options are common to many applications. At the top is the Printer ID section, with the default printer showing. By default, this is all that shows when you first click Print.

Figure 7.9. CUPS enables the user to make lots of choices on-the-fly, as shown in this Konqueror print dialog box.

Tip

Need to add a printer? Just click the icon that looks like a magic wand to the left of the Properties dialog box. This opens the KDEPrint application.

You can change many of the default settings by clicking the Properties button at the top, but Konqueror makes nearly all of them available in this dialog box when you click Expand. The tabbed properties pages let you choose a page range if you don't want to print the whole document, and you can print them last-page-to-first if you have an inkjet that spits out paper print-side up.

In the Advanced Options page, you can schedule a print job for later. If you're in a networked setting and need to enter a job or budget code into the printer, you can enter that information here, too, under Billing Information.