[cups.general] Re: Showing job on printer display

[Helge Blischke]

Michael Sweet wrote:
> Paul Ortman wrote:
> 
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Michael Sweet wrote:
>>
>>> Ramiro Alba wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello Everybody:
>>>>
>>>> I have been using lprng for long and now I am migrating to CUPS. It
>>>> is fantastic, but I would like to know how to show on printer display
>>>> the job (user an document) that it is currently printing. This is
>>>> what I 'lprng' does and it is quite usefull.
>>>
>>> This should already happen for most PostScript printers; for non-PS
>>> printers you need to have a driver that supports the necessary
>>> commands (the CUPS DDK's rastertopclx driver supports them, for
>>> example...)
>>
>>
>> Forgive my ignorance, but do you mean that when I send a print job to
>> (for instance) my HP Laserjet 4250 using the HP Laserjet 4250 PS ppd
>> that on LCD of the printer should be displayed the username of the job
>> submitter?  It currently does not do this -- instead it just says
>> "Printing from Tray 2" or similar.  I've hacked around some of this by
>> using Pykota's pre and post job hooks to call out to a little executable
>> that changes the LCD.  If I could get away from that little executable
>> I'd be quite pleased.
>>
>> So, I'm wondering, is there some configuration in either the PPD, CUPS,
>> or on the printer itself that needs to be set to get this working?
> 
> 
> As long as the PPD says that the printer supports PJL, then CUPS
> will output the necessary PJL to set the display; in CUPS 1.2, we
> actually set both the RDYMSG and job display string, which seems to
> work on all of the HP printers in our lab (that have an LCD, that
> is...)  CUPS 1.1.x just set the job display string, which *should*
> work for the 4250...
> 

.... but HP printers - at least if used via a JetDirect card - tend to keep the job display
string only as long as they are receiving the job's data or (with some models) interpreting
the PostScript program. As soon as the bitmaps for all pages are competed, the display string
usually reverts to something like "PRINTING FROM TRAY 2" or similar.

Helge


-- 
Helge Blischke
Softwareentwicklung
SRZ Berlin | Firmengruppe besscom
http://www.srz.de