[brlug-general] sharing a printer among multiple users sending contiguous jobs

[Tim Fournet]

John,
You may have solved your problem by now, but I think it's due to the 
nature of printer spooling. It's basically a FIFO rule. As jobs are 
spooled to the print server, they're put in order to be printed out. The 
Windows spooler service allows certain users to have higher priorities 
than others, and this is probably available in CUPS as well, but I don't 
think that would help your problem much. Basically, if UserA prints 20 
pages, then UserB prints 3 pages, then UserA goes back after and prints 
5 more pages, UserB's 3 pages will be in the middle.

One thing you can do to mitigate the confusion is to use Banner sheets. 
Each print job will be preceded by a special page that shows the 
username of the person who printed it. You can be creative with the 
banner sheet to make it easy to identify, maybe put a border, or if it's 
a color printer, use a color pattern so that someone sorting through the 
sheets can find the banner pages easily. You could even set aside one of 
the printer's drawers for banner sheets and put colored paper in it so 
they really stick out.

Does this help any?
-Tim


John Hebert wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I'm trying to solve a problem at work using open source.
>
> My employer wants to let multiple users print multiple jobs, or files, but these jobs have to printed as a contiguous group.
>
> For example, JoeUser wants to print out some accounting reports at the same time MaryUser wants to print out some source code. They both send multiple files, or jobs, to the same printer, but the end result is that the print output is a mixed stack of accounting reports and source code, which requires separating the jobs by hand.
>
> Surely this problem has been solved by software vendors out there, but I was wondering if anyone knew of an open source solution. If it requires CUPS on Linux, then I can go that route.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> John Hebert
>
>
>
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