I'm very interested in how you invoke ghostscript.
We have found getting pagecounts from the printer via SNMP to be very accurate, and we have been willing to ignore the "account overshoot" problem created by not knowing in advance how many pages are going to printed.
However, we have discovered that most printers do not count duplexed pages in a useful manner (always two clicks per sheet even if only one side is printed). It is possible that ghostscript accounting could be used to augment SNMP accounting.
Also, we are interested in being able to do meaningful charging for large format poster printers where the sheet size is variable. Perhaps ghostscript can provide output size information too.
Thanks, -Rick
Matt Forrest wrote:
We run all the jobs thru ghostscript to generate low-res PNG images for each page. We estimate the amount of toner that's going to be used by using percentblack from printbill. Job cost is based on number of pages actually printed (where hardware counting works) and the amount of toner used. We also compare the estimated number of pages to what the printer says to try and people doing creative things with the printer.
We currently use a simple flat file DB to store the balance of accounts. The DB is being migrated to something that is row lockable to help speed things up when we have a high load. We don't let people have a negative balance.
We only started charging for the toner usage in Jan. We had problems where a small minority of students were abusing the printers by printing pages that were all/mostly black. Our toner usage went way up and the printers had a lot of problems with jamming.
If you're interested in all the gory details of our scripts, let me know and I'll post them somewhere.
-- |Rick Cochran phone: 607-255-7618| |Cornell CIT - Systems & Operations - Net-Print FAX: 607-255-8521| |722 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]|
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