Additional PostScript capabilities provided by filters

The filters previously described also take advantage of PostScript capabilities to provide additional printing flexibility. Most of these features may be accessed through the ``mode option'' (invoked by the -y option) to the lp command. These filters allow you to use several unusual options for your print jobs. The following list describes these options and shows the option to include on the lp command line for each one.

-y reverse

Reverse the order in which pages are printed.

-y landscape

Change the orientation of a physical page from portrait to landscape.

-y x=number,y=number

Change the default position of a logical page on a physical page by moving the origin.

-y group=number

Group multiple logical pages on a single physical page.

-y magnify=number

Change the logical size of each page in a document.

-o length=number

Select the number of lines in each page of the document.

-P num_list

Select, by page numbers, a subset of a document to be printed, where num_list is page numbers or page ranges separated by commas (for example, 1,4,6-8,14- prints pages 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 14 through the end).

-n number

Print multiple copies of a document.

%%Page: label ordinal

where ordinal is a positive integer that specifies the position of the page in the sequence of pages in the document, and label is an arbitrary page label.

For example, say you have a file called report2 that has a content type simple (meaning that the content of this file is in ASCII format). You want to print six pages of this file (pages 4 through 9) with two logical pages on each physical page. Because one of the printers on your system (psprinter) is a PostScript printer, you can do this by entering the following command:

lp -d psprinter -T simple -P 4-9 -y group=2 myfile

The filter that groups these logical pages will try to position the pages on the physical page to maximize space utilization. Thus when you specify group=2, the pages will be printed side by side, so that the physical page will be landscape orientation. Landscape mode, which controls the orientation of the logical page rather than the physical page, would cause the logical pages to be positioned one on top of the other when combined with the group=2 option.