Creating greyscale queue for colour printer

[Jonathan]

Snip
> I've returned to trying to create a greyscale queue for a colour printer - to encourage users to make cheaper greyscale prints when they don't actually require colour.
> John A. Murdie
snip

You're probably way beyond me in CUPS, etc. and I do essentially single user on my notebook, but here goes anyway:

When I need a "special" printer, I run xpp (Till wrote this amazing little utility years ago.)

In its gui, I can select an existing printer and set just about any parameter the printer recognizes.  Once that's done, I can just go ahead and print, but if I don't do that, I can click on the Instances button and save this configuration as a new "virtual" printer.  Later, I can get back to it in xpp to modify or delete it.

Once this "virtual" printer is defined, I can tell lp (lp -d Printer/Instance ...) to use it.  I'm sure the same is true for lpr, but I think it's -P ....

This works great, but when printing directly from an application like OpenOffice.org writer using the printer instance, some of the settings are not honored.  I haven't tried to fix this - maybe by trying to get OOo to invoke lp with options when it prints.

Obviously, as an administrator, you can't go into every possible application and change the way it prints, but the printer/instances method might give you some new options to think about.

HTH

Joe