Document viewer Evince in Fedora does not print page borders? Here is a solution!

Well, this is not a workaround or a solution available in Evince, but this is a general solution which can be used when the usual GUI applications does not have some features. 

Today I was trying to print some lecture slides using "Document Viewer" also known as "Evince" running on my Fedora laptop. I was trying to print several pages in one output page. (4 lecture slides should be printed on a single page)

Once I got the output, I realized that it does not add a border to source pages printed on a single output page. I couldn't find an option in Evince to get that done.

Fortunately I came across about the Unix/Linux lp command which uses CUPS. (Common UNIX Printing System)
Using that I was able to get what I wanted printed precisely.

Here are the steps,

1. Find out the status of the printers you have configured in the system,

lpstat -a

This will list down all the printers you have configured in your machine. Use the preferred printer as the destination of the lp command using -d option. (see the next step)

2. Use lp command to get the job done

lp -d HP-LaserJet-400 -o sides=two-sided-short-edge -o number-up=4 -o pagesize=A4 -o landscape -o page-border=single -o fit-to-page -o number-up-layout=lrtb my_document.pdf

As you can see, we can pass multiple options to lp command including the page-border which I couldn't find in Evince. You can find the explanations of each option in lp man page.

Another great option of lp is that you can send multiple files to printer.

e.g.: if you want to print all the files which have file names starting from "bla_" then you can pass bla_* to lp command so that all of them will be printed one by one.