Force Greyscale Printing with WGM or Other

[vogtstev]

Hi everyone!!

We have a new print accounting solution on our campus that uses a release station. I am trying to figure out a way to force greyscale printing for a printer. For example: We have a color printer. Students will get charged different amounts if they print for color vs. greyscale to it. I want to have two printers to choose from in the print dialog so it’s easy to select the greyscale cue or the color cue. This would, in reality, be transparently going to one of the cues on the print release station. The print accounting software we are using doesn’t allow to force color vs greyscale on the release station so it needs to be done at the workstation level. Could I at least force a print preset? Any ideas or other possible solutions?

Thanks!
Steve

[dano]

A couple of other suggestions:

1. Depending on how sophisticated your printing hardware is you might be able to set this up from the printer end of things. You would need to be looking at workgroup class printing hardware with some reasonable print administration capabilities.

2. Modify printer PPD files. Printer options available through Mac OS X Print and Page Setup windows are established by a printer’s PPD file. By editing the file it is possible to change defaults or limit options available to the end user. This only works if you have control over the end user’s computer, such as in a computer lab. Using this method I have been able to do things like deleting paper sizes that weren’t available to the end user (we don’t permit user supplied paper manual feed situations)

[dano]

Clarification: Using this method I have been able to do things like removing choices for paper sizes, in the Page setup dialog, that aren’t loaded into a printer (we don’t permit user supplied paper manual feed situations)

[ingenious7]

Hi,

I’m guessing you are using your Mac OS X Server as the Print server with all of the queues set up on there. What you could try is setting up two queues to the same printer. Then load up the CUPS web interface on the Mac server by typing localhost:631. You should be able to see all of your printer queues in there. We use this to set up all of our queues as it gives much more flexibility than the ServerAdmin.

Anyway, once your are in the web interface, there are options to change settings on a print queue – and within there one of the settings should be to restrict to greyscale printing only.

let me know if this works for you.

[Author]

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