Force Black Printing

[mbrunt]

On our Windows network we install the same printer twice, so for example if the classroom is W106, we install W106-CLR01 (this being the normal printer driver, in colour, so Delll 3110cn for example), the second we install would be W106-BW01, (this being the same printer as above but installed using a generic HP driver), this forces the printer to print in black.

 

We then allow students to either print in black and white or colour, offering them a cheaper choice if they print in black.

 

However, I cannot get OSX to do this, if I use an incorrect driver the printer just doesnt print.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

[HodgeHi]

I don't think that there would be a way to do this as each user has the printer preferences stored in a Printers folder inside their Library folder in their Home dir.

[Dave_H]

Are your macs bound to the windows domain? can you get your macs to print at all? Who is logging in to the macs - network users or local users?

[Ric_]

What accounting software are you using? Most will recognise what is colour and charge accordingly. Thus no driver trickery needed.

[mac_shinobi]

Chapter 24. Mac Printing in Detail

 

More then likely related to to there product but has some good pointers / info - if you can find an equivelant model of printer that is only a black and white printer, you can use the driver for this model of machine ( I would of thought )

 

I know when working with Ricoh they have equivelant models of colour and also only black and white printers.

[srochford]

There's a separate issue with the Mac as well that it will print in colour to a colour printer unless you explicitly select mono in the settings (not in front of a Mac now but it's an obvious setting when you go to print).

 

This is a real nightmare because grey scale documents get printed using the mix of colour toners and (eg) Safecom charges for a colour print (because it is in colour!)

 

This setting seems to be a user specific one and we have found no way of forcing it - if someone prints a document in colour because they want it in colour then subsequent documents will also be treated as colour until you explicitly revert back to mono.

 

There may be settings to get round this - most of our Macs are very lightly managed if at all - but it's caused grief when people found they were being charged colour rates for what they thought were mono pages!

[mac_shinobi]

There may be settings to get round this - most of our Macs are very lightly managed if at all - but it's caused grief when people found they were being charged colour rates for what they thought were mono pages!

 

That was a common issue when some people were using a black and white driver on windows servers to force students to print in black and white and they were getting charged for doing colour copies due to it being grey scale and not pure black and white as the colour copier interprets the print jobs as being grey scale and not black and white even though you use a black and white printer driver - go figure

 

Settings vary depending on make and model of printer - I say that because drivers tend to differ between models and the type of driver being used.

 

Used Ricoh drivers at home on my mac and on windows at work and depending on the driver and model of printer the GUI varied and also some settings had been moved around. Also the canon printer I have at home that I have used on windows and OS X the GUI and options are totally different to the Ricoh driver GUI and also the options are named differently to a degree

[Ric_]

@mbrunt: I think we may need more info... what is your print server running? what accounting software are you using? does the problem only exist with the Dell printer mentioned above or does it also happen to other makes/models?

 

I'm not a Mac expert but I would have thought it would also be possible to change the printer preferences using a login hook if they are per user. They are no doubt stored in some daft plist file.

[HodgeHi]

If you are using Papercut the way I would do it is to create 2 queues for each printer. One colour one mono. Set each queue up with restrictions. If you print colour to the mono queue it will get denied or something to that effect.

[iSteve]

We too use PaperCut, and it detects grayscale vs colour either per document or page, and charges appropriately. Are you saying yours doesn't do this, or not correctly?