Restricting use of a colour printer to black-and-white

[John A. Murdie]

I'm wondering if and how I might use CUPS to restrict the use of a colour printer for certain users so that they can print only in black-and-white. The print dialogue boxes of certain operating systems and/or application programmes have a 'Black-and-white only' tick box, but that's leaving the authority to the user.

The motivation here is to reduce the number of printers in a space by replacing two printers - a black-and-white-only printer and a colour printer - with a single printer - a colour printer which prints cheaply in black-and-white - and yet to prevent some users from using the relatively expensive colour printing.

Is there a means in CUPS of, first, configuring the filters so that they force full-colour jobs to print in black-and-white only and, second, having a virtual printer for an existing printer which always does such forcing? I don't recall reading about any such explicit features.

John A. Murdie