I would suggest using bash as your xterm shell. Note that when an X app starts up, it starts a DOS session that runs the X application. Your X server receives the data from the DOS session and displays it. That's why some apps want to receive keyboard input through the DOS session instead of the xterm. You have been warned.
Postscript is a very versatile printer description language.
One of the neatest things you can do is print more than one logical page per physical page. On the CPSC undergrad systems, the utility for doing this is called psnup . You pass in a postscript file, and tell psnup how many logical pages per physical page, and it outputs another postscript file that you can print. Here's an example output of a2ps and psnup .