18.4 Print with lpr from Shell

The way to print a DVI file depends on your system installation. Two common ones are ‘dvips foo.dvi -o’ to make a PostScript file first and then print that, and ‘lpr -d foo.dvi’ to print a DVI file directly.

For example, the following commands will (probably) suffice to sort the indices, format, and print this manual using the texi2dvi shell script (see Format with texi2dvi).

texi2dvi texinfo.texi
dvips texinfo.dvi -o
lpr texinfo.ps

Depending on the lpr setup on your machine, you might be able to combine the last two steps into lpr -d texinfo.dvi.

You can also generate a PDF file by running texi2pdf instead of texi2dvi; a PDF is often directly printable. Or you can generate a PCL file by using dvilj instead of dvips, if you have a printer that prefers that format.

lpr is a standard program on Unix systems, but it is usually absent on MS-DOS/MS-Windows. If so, just create a PostScript or PDF or PCL file, whatever is most convenient, and print that in the usual way for your machine (e.g., by sending to the appropriate port, usually ‘PRN’).