Split Print Job to Color and B&W? 30
cheros writes "I work in an office which has various printers, and printing documents with a few color diagrams in is actually a pain. Due to the high cost of the color prints the preference is to use B&W, and print the color pages separately (with obviously an finishing stage to collate and merge the two). Is there a print filter that would automatically split the PostScript print job into a feed for two different queues? (and yes, we use B&W drawings where possible ;-)."
Cool idea, but necessary anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, don't most "modern" color printers (especially the toner-based ones) print b&w almost as cheaply as regular printers? I seem to recall that some Tek wax printers even came with "free black for life" to encourage use of the printer as the primary output device (you'd short-circuit their moneymaking strategy by making sure that only a few pages in the run contain any color).
The only other thing I can think of is to send the whole document to a B&W printer, then only the color pages to the color printer, but then again, that's probably the way you do it already.
If you're working with unix print servers and postscript printers, then I'd think it should be relatively easy to write such a filter. It'd get a bit hairy when you try to do double-sided stuff, as you'd have to track which side you were currently processing and send both sides (where one is color) to the color printer. But it should be reasonable to do, I'd think...
input filter:
- receive pages
- scan page (or pair of pages on a single sheet)
- is color there?
? yes, write this postscript snippet to file A
? no, write the snippet ode to file B
- when done:
- lpr -Pcolor a
- lpr -Pgreyscale b
- lprm self
Or somesuch. Of course, I haven't screwed around with lpd print filters in, oh, 5+ years, so I may be way off base.
My advice: Find a unix geek (preferably a PS-aware perl programmer) and promise them a six-pack of really nice beer if they can solve the problem for you.
good luck!
Re:Cool idea, but necessary anymore? (Score:1)
Re:Cool idea, but necessary anymore? (Score:1)
More like $30 per. But the term is cake, not puck. At least in our office.
Sppolq (Score:1)
Al
Re:Sppolq (Score:1)
The math took into account the cost of all consumables, like toner(duh), drum life, fuser, rollers, basically anything that had to be replaced.
-- Tim
Doesn't the printer already do that? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doesn't the printer already do that? (Score:2, Informative)
I for one would like the ability to do this. The "cheap" HP colour laser I used to have access to was several thousand pounds, and did indeed have 4 separate toner cartridges... however the colour laser still had several drawbacks:
From my point of view an auto-splitter would have been great, print the bulk of a 100+ page report to the nice high quality HP 8150, and at the same time have the colour pages sent to the slow colour printer. This would have 2 advantages, nicer quality black print, and faster printout as the b&w part of the document doesn't have to "wait" for the colour pages to be processed.
Re:Doesn't the printer already do that? (Score:3, Informative)
If your color printer is CMYK, then you're already saving as much money as you could. Granted, you're shortening the life of the fuser by running more pages through it, but in the end the cost is so minimal that one person printing wedding shower invitations will blow your savings to hell.
Now, if your color printer is RGB, then you are printing RGB black and it is costing you more. My suggestion (if you really want to save money in the long run) is to get a CMYK color printer to do double duty. You'll only be using one printer to do all your printing, and as the parent post said the black toner is a lot cheaper than the color.
Note: to my knowledge, the HP color printers are all RGB. Coming from a print environment, this does really suck.
Re:Doesn't the printer already do that? (Score:1)
Doing the filtering (Score:1)
One solution to this problem would be to filter postscript files by searching if they contain any color command (like setrgb, sethsb, colorimage). This solution is fast, but not very efficient: many postscript job contain headers that call the color operators, even if they are not needed (often they included by code that overloads such calls with a grayscale equivalent). Still this would be a first (fast) mean of finding black and white postscript filter.
A more complex, and more effective solution would be something like this.
Finnally, one trick that could work would be to add some functions in the postscript header. Basically, overload all color operators so that if they are called, they flag the current page (or better they check if the color or image they are passed is really color).
If the flag is present ignore the next showpage operator and flush the graphic state.
This way you can send the job to the black and white printer, and only the color pages will show. You send a slightly different version to the color printer, but in this case, you only print the flagged pages. Voilà
That said, make sure that the black and white and the color printer are somehow similar (same resolution) if not, the two sets of pages (color and black and white), will look to different.
Re:Doing the filtering (Score:3, Funny)
Oooh, I like this one. Combine this with what I'd described earlier -- have the input filter add this to the heder, with "ignore==color" and send to the B&W printer, then again with "ignore==b&w" and send to the color printer.
Again, though, I think you're going to depend on having a geeky-geek there to write it for you (and more importantly, fix it when it runs across really weird data that doesn't quite fit right...)
More work than it's worth (Score:1)
Re:More work than it's worth (Score:1)
Re:More work than it's worth (Score:1)
Re:More work than it's worth (Score:1)
The poster explicity mentioned the existence of a seperate collate and merge stage.
No need on an HP (Score:2)
The question would have been relevant for color lasers a few years ago, but I think the manufacturers have taken care of this.
Now, if your color device is something painfully slow like a network-attached inkjet, then that's another story.
If you're using PostScript it should be a fairly straightforward PS filter.
Re:No need on an HP (Score:2, Informative)
I also delt with a HP 4500c at my old job. Besides needing to be vaccuumed out every month, and having the $170 immaging drum run out every 3-4 months, it did have the four toners, and a fifth extra big black only toner that ran a lot faster. The manual also said that if it was a b&w only page it went off the jumbo black toner, but if there was even a single pixle of color, it ran against all four color toners. (C,M,Y,& black).
Our other office had the 8500c, but there always seemed to be a reason it was not in use... needing parts, new pickup pads, damaged roller, no yellow toner available, paper jam.
You guys aren't getting it... (Score:1)
Commercial solution ... but proves it exists. (Score:3, Informative)
This seems to be for those using their systems, but seems to offer evidence that the idea at least exists out there. Years back when I worked at Xerox, I thought I remembered something in development to balance a job between the B&W DocuTech and a color printer
--
BTW - searching google for split print color b&w popped this up first result.
I have a python script (Score:2, Informative)
See dvicoloursplit.py [cam.ac.uk]
(released under the GPL)
It works by generating postscripts for each page, converting to a bitmap, then scanning the bitmap for colour pixels. Not very clever, but works. I tried to examine the postscript itself, but it's very hard to find the colour in a postscript. It can easily be "encoded" in a jpg bitmap, or something else.
Re:I have a python script (Score:2)
Think I did this... (Score:3, Informative)
Write some postscript that redefines all the colour-setting commands and the colour bitmap commands. The redefined commands set a variable to say this page is colour.
Redefine 'showpage' to only do a real 'showpage' if the 'page-is-colour' variable is set. Clear the variable.
Now rerun, but reverse the logic to do 'showpage' on the mono pages. You can pass the sense of the logic to ghostscript on the command line.
Of course this wont tell you if there is a grey-scale bitmap in a colour image command. You could always redefine the image command to check that all the pixels have the same r,g,b colours....
I'll try and dig the code out.
Baz
Re:Think I did this... (Score:1)
Re:Think I did this... (Score:2)
One last chance - I'll have to write the colour/mono state to a file! Yes!
Baz
Tektronix Color Printers (Score:1)
I recommend the Phaser 860N
http://www.officeprinting.xerox.com/perl-bin/pr
Free black ink for the life of the printer!
You can't beat that!
Re:Tektronix Color Printers (Score:2)
We have one of these and I would issue only a cautious recommendation.
In short, if you're looking for a general-purpose, cost-effective printer for PowerPoint slides and printing out web pages to tack on the break-room bulletin board, this might be the printer for you.
If, on the other hand, you're expecting to do any serious proofing, graphics work, etc., then run, don't walk, away as fast as you can.