John, You may have solved your problem by now, but I think it's due to the nature of printer spooling. It's basically a FIFO rule. As jobs are spooled to the print server, they're put in order to be printed out. The Windows spooler service allows certain users to have higher priorities than others, and this is probably available in CUPS as well, but I don't think that would help your problem much. Basically, if UserA prints 20 pages, then UserB prints 3 pages, then UserA goes back after and prints 5 more pages, UserB's 3 pages will be in the middle.
One thing you can do to mitigate the confusion is to use Banner sheets. Each print job will be preceded by a special page that shows the username of the person who printed it. You can be creative with the banner sheet to make it easy to identify, maybe put a border, or if it's a color printer, use a color pattern so that someone sorting through the sheets can find the banner pages easily. You could even set aside one of the printer's drawers for banner sheets and put colored paper in it so they really stick out. Does this help any? -Tim John Hebert wrote: > Howdy, > > I'm trying to solve a problem at work using open source. > > My employer wants to let multiple users print multiple jobs, or files, but > these jobs have to printed as a contiguous group. > > For example, JoeUser wants to print out some accounting reports at the same > time MaryUser wants to print out some source code. They both send multiple > files, or jobs, to the same printer, but the end result is that the print > output is a mixed stack of accounting reports and source code, which requires > separating the jobs by hand. > > Surely this problem has been solved by software vendors out there, but I was > wondering if anyone knew of an open source solution. If it requires CUPS on > Linux, then I can go that route. > > Any ideas? > > Thanks, > John Hebert > > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at brlug.net > http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net >
