[cups.general] job settings

[William Strucke]

Hello!  I joined this list today after scouring the archives and  
documentation and not finding what I'm looking for.  I'd like to  
apologize if this is either clearly addressed somewhere or just  
completely obvious...

I'll briefly explain my goal first and then the problem I have:

I manage the computer systems for a college consisting of about 800  
macs and 100 windows based pcs.  To make printer management and  
accounting easier, I configure all of the network print queues on a  
mac os 10.5 server running the base install of cups 1.3.8.  This works  
well for about 90% of our users -- all of the workstations print via  
IPP to the cups server and the server then releases the jobs to the  
printers via each printer's LPR queue.

The problem I am seeing is that it seems that when some printers have  
options outside of the "norm", such as duplexing, I can not seem to  
get the cups server to obey the configuration at print time by the  
clients.

Essentially -- printer A has a duplexer -- I enable duplexing on the  
printer, on the cups server, and on the client as an option.  If the  
client sends a job with two sided printing (say for Microsoft Word)  
the job ends up coming out one sided only.  I've found that if I  
directly connect the client to the printer the same configuration  
results in the job printing two sided.  When I set the print server to  
default to two sided, all jobs print two sided, regardless of the  
client setting.  When I configure the print server for one sided  
printing, I can not make anything print two sided from the client.  It  
feels like the cups server is accepting all of the jobs but applying  
it's default print settings to everything.  Does that make any sense?

So -- am I not understanding how this should work?  Is there a better  
or different way to implement this that I'm not seeing right now?


Thank you for your time.


Sincerely,

William Strucke
Systems Manager
College of the Arts at The Ohio State University
strucke.1 at osu.edu or 614.292.1059