[cups.general] banner pages in cups

[Michael Sweet]

Jerome Alet wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 09:22:26AM -0400, Michael De Vlaminck wrote:
>> I'm using cups 1.1 and I need to use bannerpages with it. We allready 
>> have a script that generates these bannerpages using the username, 
>> hostname and printqueuename. It's a shellscript which generates postscript.
>> Is it possible to use this script in cups so this is executed and 
>> printed before every printjob, no matter what the user chooses for a 
>> bannerpage in for example, kprinter?
> 
> To the best of my knowledge this is not supported in CUPS.
> 
> I submitted a patch to do just this but it wasn't integrated.

There is still a pending RFE for this, but there are a bunch of
security and performance issues we need to resolve.

One possible workaround is to have the application submit its
own banner and flag it as such (so only 1 copy is printed, etc.),
however in environments that have mandatory labeling requirements
that doesn't work so well...

We *will* end up doing something, but at this point we just don't
know what or when that will be...

> However, from what I know about your setup, I think you'll encounter
> a lot of problems because banner pages in CUPS are not part of
> the print job ; the backend is launched one time for the banner
> and one time for the job itself.

In CUPS 1.1.x, this is true (and the backend might be run many
times depending on the number of files in the job and whether you
request leading and/or trailing banner pages), however CUPS 1.2.x
and beyond uses a single instance of the backend for the entire
job.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com