printing-commandline.txt

Ever wondered how you can print from command line?
being a linux user and knowing how to print from commandline
will help you automate the printing process.
Consider a case when you have a long list of files to print, let alone printing images.

Printing images directly to paper can be tricky. Consider photographed A4 images and you want to print them
directly to pdf. cups-pdf comes in handy. You may need to take sometime to familiarize with the tool
 especially being able to configure it for optimized performance.

 Unix-like systems use CUPS (a standards bases) Common Unix Printing System. Thanks to Apple.Inc

 Most Unix systems come pre-installed with cups, and the command to print is simply lp.


 Use man lp for a detailed documentation. We will keep updating this page, so feel free to bookmark it and
 visit back later.

 you can simply run 

 lp filename.pdf (this will printy directly to your configured default printer)

 to print to a specific printer
 ld -d $PRINTERNAME filename.pdf

 PRINTING IMAGES TO PDF.
 You may want to install cups-pdf which installs a printer called CUPS-PDF in your system.
 Any file that's sent to this printer will be converted to PDF. and by default it will be
 saved in ~/PDF. (this can be configured otherwise)

 Installation:
 sudo apt install cupd-pdf

 then 

 lp mydocument.png (after it is done, open ~/PDF/)

In a case where you have a large number of files to print you can run than as a job in a loop like
for f in file1 file2 file3 file4 ...; 
lp $f
done
this loop will go through each of the files and print them.

then you can use pdftk to join the individual pdf files into one large pdf document.

pdftk list-all-files-to-merge-here cat output merged-file-name.pdf

Read more about pdftk here: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/
 The administration of the cups printing pool can be done graphically through a web page at http://localhost:631