On Mon, 17 May 2004 14:19:55 -0600
"William D. Colburn (aka Schlake)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Has anyone tried to get a dye sub printer working with LPRng?  I want
> UNIX users to be able to send a jpeg via lpr, and have LPRng pop out a
> print for them, and properly bill their student account for having done
> so.
> 
> The only printer I can find that might work is the Kodak 8660, since it
> supports a network card, but I can't find any evidence of anyone having
> done this.
> 
> Anyone have any insight?

I don't see why you couldn't do this, provided:

1. you can come up with a consistent way of translating JPEG's (or whatever 
   graphic format you choose to support) to the native language of the 
   printer in question
2. you can get billing information, whether that be dye/ink/toner used 
   or pages printed, to bill the user
3. you have an accounting mechanism in place that can be accessed via
   command-line with a command executed by one of the LPRng/ifhp 
   filters

Regarding #1, you need to determine how the image is rendered.  Does one 
bit in the image translate to one bit on the paper?  Do you scale the 
image to fill the page?  Do you scale the image to keep it from being 
chopped off the page if it doesn't otherwise fit on the page?  Printing
graphic images for different purposes may dictate different scaling 
behavior is necessary.  If you need different scaling behavior, then 
you're going to need multiple queues to handle those modes.

Regarding #2, that depends on the printer in question.  Our old 
Tektronix Phaser 850 had decent billing information in it it, but it 
was much cheaper to operate.  All we cared about was what type of media
was printed and how many pages.  More expensive printers will require 
more accurate billing data.  My experience says you'll be wandering 
into SNMP status queries before you find such data available 
(although dye-sub printers are into an entirely new realm of devices, 
so who knows...).

-- 
============================================================================
   John Perkins                   |   University of Wisconsin-Madison
   Associate Researcher           |   Department of Computer Science
   [EMAIL PROTECTED]              |   1210 W. Dayton St.
   608-262-0438/608-262-6626 FAX  |   Madison, WI  53706-1685
============================================================================




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