[clug] Fancy Print Job Control

[Robert Edwards]

We have had a system running here at DCS, ANU for several years that amounts 
to a fancy UI for a simple colour inkjet printer. The machine (an old P-100) 
runs a print spooler, ghostscript etc. and accepts print jobs. Instead of 
immediately printing them out, it lists them onto a text console (using 
ncurses) and allows a user to select which job currently awaiting printing to 
actually print. This allows the user time to set up transparencies or 
whatever before the printing commences.

What I am looking for is a more supported way of doing this. We have briefly 
looked at CUPS and lprng but nothing has jumped out at us.

What we really want is something like the following:

Incoming printjobs get rasterized and stored as individual pages in a 
secondary spool directory tagged with the job name and user name and any 
other pertinent information.

A UI allows a user to select their job from a text console or X-window, enter 
a password (checked with PAM) and then it starts printing to the inkjet.

As we have already rasterized the job, we know how many pages it will use, 
this is displayed and, when printed, is potentially subtracted from a quota.

Jobs can be stopped, deleted, repeated and, whilst stopped, other jobs can be 
put through (eg. pause a long print job to allow someone elses quick job 
through).

Basically, a fancy UI onto a simple inkjet to allow organisation wide printing 
to it.

Has anyone seen a similar effort being undertaken that we simply haven't seen 
on freshmeat yet?

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.