[cups.general] Creating greyscale queue for colour printer

[Brian Kroth]

Jonathan <josephj at main.nc.us> 2010-09-14 21:37:
> 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:

Yeah, and I'm coming at it from a central printserver perspective
complete with accounting and other scripting foo.

> 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.

When I last looked in to this (about a month ago) the libgnomeprint(ui)
libs (at least on Debian Lenny/Squeeze) didn't display printer/instance
queues in any dialogs (eg: firefox/iceweasel, abiword, gedit, etc.).
ooffice uses a separate library that exposes queue instances as well as
much more details from the PPD for that queue.

For example:
"lpoptions -p myqueue -l" to see what you want to set for the queue
instance, then setup two queue instances with different options (eg: bw
and color).
# lpoptions -p myqueue/bw -o ColorModel=Gray
# lpoptions -p myqueue/color -o ColorModel=CMYK

# lpstat -t | grep myqueue/
(returns data)

Firefox -> Print doesn't show either of them.

If you look around line 633 of
libgnomeprint-2.18.7/libgnomeprint/modules/cups/gnome-print-cups.c
there's a section of code marked FIXME and commented out that appears to
ignore them for now.  I seem to recall seeing a bug on this ...

On top of that I don't think Windows clients can access queue/instances
through cups-lpd.  

Anyways, all of this is why I fell back to separate queues (eg:
myqueue-color, myqueue-bw) with different options and the same printer
device uri and depend upon them to lock each other out (it is tea4cups
that's doing this btw).

Brian
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