LPrint

Note: Since Sublime Text 4 (build 4107, May 2021), Sublime has built-in printing support via File -> Print, which prints through a browser. This extension is therefore mostly obsolete.

LPrint is a fairly flexible printing system for Sublime Text 3. It uses lp/lpstat to print and can filter documents through any number of programs before printing.

How do I print?

Two commands are available for printing: Print Document and Quick Print. The former allows you to print the current document on a printer of your choice, while Quick Print will use the default printer.

The following hotkeys are available by default:

• alt+shift+p: Print Document
• alt+shift+o: Quick Print
• alt+shift+s: Select Printer (see printer selection below).

You can also print from the menu, using File -> Print Document.

How do I select a different printer?

Use the Select Printer command. The selected printer will be used whenever you use Quick Print and preselected on Print Document.

This is also available via the menu: Preferences -> Select Printer.

How do I make the output less ugly?

You need to select a better filter. LPrint's defaults are chosen to maximize the chance you'll get a printout once you hit print, not to produce pretty results.

How do I configure other options?

LPrint uses its own settings (see Preferences -> Package Settings -> LPrint), by editing your user settings you can override these. For example, if you want to use enscript (needs to be installed) as your default filter, you can set it up as follows:

{
  "filter_chain": ["Enscript"]
}

All text slated for printing will first be run through the EnscriptFilter and then passed on to CUPS as postscript.

All filters have their own quirks due to the underlying utilities (for example, enscript does not support utf8 while paps does, the latter does not do syntax highlighting and so on).

Other configurable settings like paper size, number of copies, duplex can be configured normally, have a look at the default settings file for a list of options.

How do I configure syntax-specific settings?

Configuring the print-system per syntax is useful because it allows setting up filters solely for a single filetype. An example is setting up RST2PDF for reStructuredText files.

The quickest way to edit these is opening a file with the syntax you want special options for and use Preferences -> Package Settings -> LPrint -> Settings - Current Filetype. Here is a useful example:

{
  "filter_chain": ["RST2PDF"]
}

Added to the reStructuredText syntax-specific settings file this will result in nicely rendered output (make sure to install rst2pdf though). You can print a reStructuredText document to try it out now!

How does it work?

lp

lp is usually found on Unix systems, as part of CUPS. LPrint is developed primarily on Linux, it could work on OS X as well - if it breaks, send patches.

Filters

LPrint uses filters to produce printable output. A filter is given a specific type of input and produces an output that may or may not be suitable for printing.

The simplest filter is the UTF8-filter. It will take a string of text (i.e. the buffer to be printed) and output UTF8-encoded "binary" text. Since this can be passed to lp, it is the default, as it reliably produces a printable output (albeit of the ugly kind).

What filters are available?

UTF8

The UTF8Filter is the most basic filter, it will encode your unicode text into UTF8, making it possible to ship it directly to lp.

Enscript

Calls enscript with a range of options. Enscript is finnicky about fonts and many default configurations do not include support TrueType fonts, which often make up the majority of fonts on a system. If your printed pages are all empty, try changing font_family to Courier and font_size to 10.

PAPS

An alternative to Enscript. Does not support syntax highlighting (at least not at this moment), but uses utf8 natively and handles fonts like you would expect.

You should have paps installed before using this.

RST2PDF

Runs your document through rst2pdf. Should be activated using syntax-specific configuration options (see How do I configure syntax-specific settings?).

Install rst2pdf before using.