dvips does not print anything
 

Hello,

I'm having problems printing a .dvi file directly using dvips - it
does nothing and no job appears in the printer queue. If I first
generate a .ps file using dvips -o, I can use lpr to print the .ps
file without any problems. Simiarly, I can also generate a .pdf
file and print it from acroread. How can I get dvips to print the .dvi
file directly?

I'm running CentOS 6.5 and dvips is part of the texlive-dvips pacakge.

Thanks for any help.
Terence

Hi,

the default behaviour of recent versions of dvips is to make a ps file even if the -o option is not given. I had a quick look at the info page and it seems that it needs to be specifically configured to make it send the output to a printer. It wasn't immediately clear to me how to set this up. I think you'll have to dig through the documentation.

Evo2.

Aha! I didn't know that. Having dug around the various configuration files, I've finally found how to do that.

Step 1: edit the file /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps - there is a line in there as follows:

% How to print, maybe with lp instead lpr, etc. If commented-out, output
% will go into a file by default.
o |lpr

(Uncomment the 'o |lpr' line.)

Step 2: You must now get dvips to search for this config.ps file (if it's not already set up to do this). This can be done in one of 2 ways:

1. Set the environment variable TEXCONFIG to /usr/share/texmf/dvips// for an individual user.
2. Do this system wide by putting the following line in the file /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf (create the file if it
doesn't exist already):

TEXCONFIG = /usr/share/texmf/dvips//