ppr-list-digest volume 3, number 23, message 1

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From: "Espen H. Koht" <ehk20@cus.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 10:18:21 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: PPR: 'Jake' mode & interface for PPR?

Somewhere in the middle of my list of useful things to do around here, I
have to see if PPR can be set up to get a few printers to work in a
'Jake'-like mode. Before I go any further, has anyone else done something
like this? 

Jake is a printing package at Columbia which operates in a very way which
would be very useful for us. It works something like this:

1) User submits job
2) Spooler queues job and puts it on hold
3) User makes her way to the printer, next to which is a terminal
4) User selects job from a list of held jobs for that printer
5) User authenticates herself
6) User selects whether to print or to cancel job (and whether to duplex
print it or not)

I like this idea for several reasons:
1) Even though we charge for printing, users print a surprising amount of
stuff that never gets collected. Saving paper is probably good on
principle.
2) We now have a number of users who want to print from remote locations
whose print-outs have a significant 'vulnerable period' where they risk
being prematurely recycled.

Since PPR is by far our printer spooler of choice, I'm basically looking
into whether it can be set up in a similar way. 

For the basic mechanism I suppose you could either force jobs to be
submitted with --hold and then have them released to start printing, or
have a permanently stopped print queue from which jobs can be moved to a
live queue to start printing. I see the latter mechanism as part of a
potential future development, where a user only needs to decide at the
point he reaches a printer that it should come out on that specific
device. Initially, I'm looking at a single queue and printer scenario and
I'm not terribly worried about authentication at the time of release (for
the moment). 

Any suggestions or comments?

Espen