A.Raman@massey.ac.nz (A.V.Raman) (05/07/91)
Hi all, I'm trying to account for pages printed through our network printers. These are Brother HL-8e printers emulating HP laserjets. The Output-filter that the lpd passes the job through currently looks for newlines/formfeeds, i.e, outside raster graphic sequences etc. to get an approximate value of pages printed. I also assumed that an a4 bond sheet can contain 66 lines hoping that the page count will work out ok in the long run. But this is proving to be inadequate as some word processors are spacing between lines using mini linefeeds. That is, setting the lines per inch to be very small and making a number of linefeeds to space down the required amount to the next line. The current scheme also fails miserably if someone prints in a very small or very large font. Besides, there are so many other escape sequences in the HP laserjet command set that need to be looked at other than the simple raster graphics ones, with the result that counting the exact number of pages that get printed is proving to be a pain. I was wondering if one of you had faced a similar problem and if so, had some program/filter that actually considered all escape sequences and counted the pages like the printer does. It will be good if I can talk to such a program to obtain my page count, or optionally have the program make the accounting entry. Any help in this regard will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. - &