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

[John A. Murdie]

> John A.  Murdie wrote:
>
> > 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.
> > ...
>
> It depends on what printer you are using.
> If the printer speaks PostScript natively, you could set up a second CUPS
> queue pointing to the same physical printer for b/w-only printing and edit
> this queue's PPD as follows:
>
> Insert the following snippet near the PPD's section denoting the device
> capabilities (like printer memory etc.):
> ---snip---
> *JobPatchFile 1 : "% force printer to b/w only
> <</ProcessColorModel /DeviceGray>>setpagedevice
> "
> *End
> ---snip---
>
> After editing, restart CPS and print a CUPS test page to this
> queue.If the color wheel on the printed test page *does* only
> contain gray segments, this hack works; otherwise you need to
> look for another workaround.
>
> Helge

Thank you, Helge! I will experiment with this.

As for restricting which users have access to which queue, that's more difficult - as I already know; we use Kerberos to authenticate users of our CUPS, but that then causes us to fall foul of the problem I described in STR #2813.

John A. Murdie