Cups virtual printer / scripting

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Hey folks:

I’m searching for someone with intermediate or advanced knowledge level working with cups printer daemon.

Scenario:

My goal is to let cups or some kinda virtual printer running on cups decide whether use my color ink printer or my grayscale laser printer.

I thought about achieving this, by either getting some information from the client (like document or photo setting for the virtual printer) or by letting a script go over the document and decide if it is necessary to use a color printer or grayscale.

greetings:

CodingSheep

2

Isnt grayscale still technically color because it uses all the color inks equally but with varrying density of dots?

3

Very easy to do.

Create your virtual printer, and when it comes time to select the driver, either say you have a sysV interface script and upload the following, or leave it at RAW (no driver) and drop the following script into /etc/cups/interfaces/ with the exact name of the printer, then restart cups.

#!/bin/bash 

REQID="$1"
USER="$2"
TITLE="$(echo "$3"|awk -F'/' '{print $NF}')"
COPIES="$4"
OPTIONS="$5"
ORIGIN="$(echo "$OPTIONS"|awk -F'job-originating-host-name=' '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}')"
TIME="$(echo "$OPTIONS"|awk -F'time-at-creation=' '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}')"

shift;shift;shift;shift;shift

your-color-test-program $*
RET=$?
if [ "$RET" == "0" ]; then
  lp -d colorinkjet -n "$COPIES" -o ColorMode=Color $*
else
  lp -d bwlaserjet -n "$COPIES" -o ColorMode=Monochrome $*
fi
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