If you have a presentation document, a PDF file, or some other document you want to print multiple pages per sheet, you can use the ‘psnup’ command to do this. This is convenient if there is no option in an application’s printing dialog box to print multiple pages to one sheet.
WARNING: This does not work for all applications. This tutorial generally works for PDF files, typed documents/text files and presentations.
1. Save your document as a postscript (.ps) file. (For information on how to do this, please see the FAQ topic, “How do I print to a Postscript file?”)
2. In the terminal, change into the directory where your postscript file is saved.
3. The general format (syntax) of the ‘psnup’ command is as follows:
psnup -n inputfile.ps outputfile.ps
Where ‘n’ is the number of pages per sheet, ‘inputfile.ps’ is the postscript file you created in step 3, and ‘outputfile.ps’ will be the postscript file that ‘psnup’ creates with your ‘n’ number of pages per sheet.
An example for printing four pages of a to one sheet would be:
psnup -4 file.ps print.ps
4. After you typed the ‘psnup’ command in the format described above, you now have a PostScript file with four pages per sheet. Next you will want to print the ‘.ps’ file that ‘psnup’ created. Type the following command in the terminal:
lpr print.ps
This will send ‘print.ps’ to the printer to be printed.
5. If you would like to read more about the ‘psnup’ command, open a terminal and type:
man psnup
This will open up the manual/user’s guide for psnup.
Posted in: Printing