Brother MFC-9320CW Printing For Arch Linux

When I was setting up printing on my laptop, I ran into some issue where the cups test page would come out flawlessly, but trying to print via browser, or via command line (lp, lpr, a2ps, vim’s :hardcopy, etc) would result in the page being shifted down and the last ~inch being cut off.

The solutions other people posted online didn’t quite fix my issue, so give this a shot if you find yourself the same scenario.

Make sure you have both of these packages installed from the Arch User Repository:

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brother-9320cw-cups-bin 1.1.2-1
brother-9320cw-lpr-bin 1.1.2-1

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Command Line Printing

From the a2ps manual online or via man a2ps or info a2ps:

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a2ps reads several files before the command line options. In order, they are:
1. the system configuration file (typically /usr/local/etc/a2ps.cfg) unless you have defined the environment variable ‘A2PS_CONFIG’, in which case a2ps reads the file it points to;
2. the user’s home configuration file ($HOME/.a2ps/a2psrc)
3. the local file (./.a2psrc)

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I know that I’m only ever going to be printing on letter sized paper, so I added the following to my configuration file ~/.a2ps/a2psrc:

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Options: --medium=Letter

# Letter for Brother Printer
#       name        w       h       11x     lly     urx     ury
Medium: Letter      612     792     12      72      576     792     

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Explained in the manual:

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where wxh are the dimension of the sheet, and the four other stand for lower left x and y, upper right x and y

(...)

If for instance you want to use Letter as medium, then use:

Options: --medium=Letter

It is exactly the same as always giving a2ps the option ‘--medium=Letter’ at run time.

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This is good enough for vim’s :hardcopy, passing a .pdf attachment out of neomutt, and that sort of thing, if your needs are more complicated then this will work as a baseline configuration.

Printing via Browser/System Dialog

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Go to the cups webGUI by connecting to http://localhost:631 in your browser, go to printer and select yours, then in the second dropdown menu click on set default options and use your linux login when challenged

Cups > Printer > Set Default Options

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Media Size: Custom 
Width: 612 
Height: 792 
Units: Points

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EDIT: UPDATE PT2

∵ Redrick Schuhart ∴ 2025-12-17