[cups.general] One print job to multiple printers

[alet at librelogiciel.com]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:22:23AM -0700, Rolands wrote:
> Hi, I need to set up printing environment, where one print job is 
> sent to multiple printers. Is it possible with Cups and Samba?

To the best of my knowledge it's not possible with CUPS.

You could specify the printing command in your smb.conf to be a script
of your own which reroute the job to multiple printers at once, but
you'd lose the ability for Samba to really dialog with CUPS.

The solution I'd recommend is to use something like Tea4CUPS,
available from http://www.pykota.com and which is entirely
transparent. It allows you to capture the print job en route to the
(optional) physical printer and do whatever you want with it (like
reroute it to printers 1, 2 and 4 but only if job was sent from
192.168.34.23, for example).

You only need to modify your printers.conf so that your print queue is
managed with Tea4CUPS, and then define one or more scripts of your own
to be launched when the job reaches this print queue. Tea4CUPS will
then launch your scripts while making available to them most
job-related informations through environment variables.

bye

Jerome Alet