Using athena, the easiest way to print is with lpr. This means that most files must be converted to Postscript before printing. Thus, a typical Friday morning in the Athena clusters contains a lot of:

# pdf2ps file1.pdf
# pdf2ps file2.pdf
# pdf2ps file3.pdf
# lpq
# lpr file1.ps
# lpr file2.ps
# lpr file3.ps


Replacing "lpr" with "lpr -Pquickprint2" or "lpr -Psimmons2" or whatnot if you want double-sided printing. This is, to put it nicely, a pain. Not only might you have multiple peoples' print jobs mixed up together, but you have three cover sheets where you really only need one. And you're probably in the fishbowl quickcluster, trying to (if you're in a wheelchair) type on a keyboard at chin height while watching a monitor that is two feet above your head. Or maybe that last bit is just me. Anyway, it's 10 minutes before class, so you're in a hurry.

The solution is to concatenate your PDFs, which I have explained in the first real post on my new blog. I'll still be posting here; that's just to memoize techie tricks. And no, that's not a typo - I do mean memoize.