[comp.dcom.lans] Novell Print Charging

zlcbeowen@qut.edu.au (03/14/90)

Hamish Marson writes:

>I'm looking for a package that will sit on my Novell network & charge users
>for the number of pages that they print on a particular printer.

So am I!  I considered writing one myself, but it ended up in the too hard
basket.  A general purpose package would need a seperate driver for each
different printer on the network to be able to parse data sent through the
print queues and calculate page breaks (not just count form-feeds).  Handling 
graphics could be a little tricky.  At this stage, we're only interested in 
charging usage on an HP Laserjet II.  Anyone care to write something ... ?

>PS. We're having problems with downloadable fonts and out laserjet II printer
>    ie they don;t work. We're having to download them from a workstation then
>    reconnect the printer to the fileserver. Any opinions?

2 common problems with downloadable fonts:
	1 - Make sure you have the "file contents" set to "Byte stream" in
		the job specification (set with PRINTCON).  Otherwise, Netware
		may interpret some of the font data as control characters.  I
		don't know of a way to do this from the CAPTURE command line.
	2 - If you use PRINTCON jobs, you will probably have a reset sequence
		at the end of the job, so the font will be cleared and need to
		downloaded again for the next job.

Chris Owen
Library
Queensland University of Technology

dzubin@herald.usask.ca (Thomas Dzubin) (03/16/90)

In article <8337.25fe6351@qut.edu.au> zlcbeowen@qut.edu.au writes:
>graphics could be a little tricky.  At this stage, we're only interested in 
>charging usage on an HP Laserjet II.  Anyone care to write something ... ?
>
>Chris Owen
>Library
>Queensland University of Technology

Here at our Humanities & Social Sciences computer lab (23 Mac & 23 IBMs) we
have a little magnetic card reader hooked up to each laser printer which
simulates a paper out signal when there is no card in the reader or when
the card has run out of funds.  The magnetic card doohicky debits  the card
a certain (settable) amount each time a page gets printed.  We sell $5 and
$10 cards and charge 20 cents per page for laser printing.
...it works really well...it is made by CCV systems of Toronto.
B.T.W.  The laser printers are hooked up to dedicated micros since hooking
them up to our net would be a mess with this cash card system.

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Thomas Dzubin, B.Sc.                #include <cutequote.h>
a.k.a. dzubin@herald.usask.ca
Humanities & Social Sciences Computer Lab Manager.  (306) 966-5507