Chapter 6 Printing AnswerBook2 Documents

The AnswerBook2 printing function lets you print books or chapters in PostScript format. The quality of the AnswerBook2 printing function is not as good as a printed book; however, the AnswerBook2 output includes page numbers and is more similar to a printed book than a typical "screen print." For more information, see the following topics:

Selecting Items to Print

The AnswerBook2 printing function brings up a page that lists section titles or man page names (for SGML-based man pages), with a checkbox next to each title. To print, select items on the page, then click on the Print button at the bottom of the list. You can make the following selections:

To print the entire book, choose the top item on the list (All Sections).
To print a section or man page, click on the checkbox next to the title.
To print a specific page in a book (other than an SGML-based man page), go to that page and use your browser's print function.

If you choose to print the entire book and also select individual segments, one copy of the entire book is printed.

When you click on Print, the AnswerBook2 server returns information in PostScript^TM format. What happens with the PostScript information depends on your web browser's configuration. For more information, see "Changing Printing Options".

Changing Printing Options

The AnswerBook2 printing function returns information in PostScript^TM format for printing. What happens with the PostScript information depends on your web browser's configuration. Specifically, the AnswerBook2 print mechanism responds according to what is configured in the MIME type for application/postscript. To change this configuration, you need to use your web browser's functions.

The following examples illustrate how to change your printing options for a version of the "HotJava Browser" and "Netscape Navigator Browser". Specific steps will change, depending on the version of the browser you are using, but are provided here for illustrative purposes.

HotJava Browser

Use the Edit menu to go to the Preferences window.

Select Viewer Applications.

Scroll down the Content Types list until you find an entry for Postscript File or for application/postscript.

The entry to display the PostScript information using ImageTool would have View in Application selected for what to do and imagetool %s in the application field.

To print directly to a printer, you would change the application field to something like lp -d my_printer %s and leave everything else the same.

Netscape Navigator Browser

Use the Options menu to go to the General Preferences window.

Select Helpers and change the entry for application/postscript.

The entry to display the PostScript information using ImageTool would be imagetool %s.

The entry to print directly to a PostScript-compatible printer would be something like cat %s | lp -d my_printer.