Print Management!!!!!!!!!

[KWestos]

We use Pcounter for managing our printers. It works ok but we now need more. What we want is a management software that can establish how much coverage on a page and debit accordingly. At the moment if someone prints out one line of colour they are deducted the same as if someone had printed out an edge to edge full colour powerpoint.

Is there any software out there that does this.

Many thanks

[RTFM]

I know papercut can differentiate between colour and black and white and charge accordingly.

 

The problem with this is if it does 1 word in colour and the rest black it will charge for a colour page even though its only one word........

 

A software that can do what you are after would be handy but i've not heard of one that does it.......

[Domino]

Personally I think charging the same for one line of colour as a full page is the way to go

 

make people think twice about whether they need something in colour or can cope with b&w

 

But no, I don't think you'd find anything that would do that - you'd need to have a full page render of everything printed before matching anything not white, black or grayscale and then calculating the coverage

 

you're talking an awful lot of slowdown to the print process.

[dhicks]

What we want is a management software that can establish how much coverage on a page and debit accordingly.

 

PyKota can do this - it even makes the functionality available as a library for use in your own scripts, if you want.

 

--

David Hicks

[chrisbrown]

PyKota can do this - it even makes the functionality available as a library for use in your own scripts, if you want.

 

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should" is something that I think rings very true here. Your print server is under enough load simply to account for print jobs, letalone scan every single one of them for coverage. If you've only got a thousand or so jobs in a day and a dedicated print server this may be suitable. We have a dedicated print server, with hundreds of jobs in the queues at any one point and I know for a fact that implementing any extra processing will kill the poor box - and it's a Xeon 5500 with 12GB of RAM!

 

Papercut will do that to you ...