Musings on Printer Control

[Robert Sullivan]

(crossposted to WEB4LIB, SYSLIB-L and LIBNT-L)

As I pondered the mixed results of Yet Another Printer Control Experiment, it
occurred to me that maybe there's a simpler answer to this problem.

My exchanges with some of you off list lead me to believe two things:

* No matter how complex your procedures, someone else will come up with
something more byzantine.

* Most of us don't need fancy features like user tracking and page quotas; we
just want to save trees and our supply budgets.  This is the vast middle ground
between tiny libraries with only one PC and those large enough that something
like UnipriNT can be economical.

I've been playing around with batch files and trying to figure out how to mimic
the functionality of the Windows printer control window, when I realized that
the p.c. window would serve perfectly well with a minor change.

You could set the printer on pause, but that doesn't give you control over
individual jobs.  You can play with the scheduling, but this gets very tedious
(it is a measure of our desperation that we are actually doing this).

On the other hand, suppose right-clicking on a document in the (paused) printer
control window included a "print now" option which would redirect it to an open
queue.  I'm not a C/C++ programmer (or I'd be working on this myself), but it
seems like a small utility could do this.  Rather than a complex printer
management system, this would satisfy the needs of many libraries.

This would require a separate staff PC and someone to release printouts, but we
already have our printer at a desk which is always staffed.

I hope this gives someone an idea for how to accomplish this.  Maybe such a
utility already exists?

Bob Sullivan                               scp_sulli at sals.edu
Schenectady County Public Library (NY)     http://www.scpl.org