Generate banners with pkbanner
Last modified on $Date$
CUPS integrated bannering facility sucks because banners can only
be static PostScript files, even if they can include a few dynamic datas. Also it is possible
to have several banners and jobs mixed in an unexpected way because of the way CUPS
works.
To fix this problem for good, PyKota can use its own banners, which can be :
Any static file, not only PostScript ones.
The output of any executable command of your choice, launched at printing time,
and to which are made available a bunch of environment variables which can help
your command create a purely dynamic banner on the fly. In particular your
command knows all about the status of the current user's print quota information.
Although you can use any command to generate banners for you, you can also use
the pkbanner command line tool which is included in PyKota.
It was designed for ease of use, without any compromise on its flexibility.
For example pkbanner allows you to specify a particular logo and url to be
printed on the banner pages, as well as define a transparency factor to save toner while
printing banners. You can also choose a particular page size to use, as well as include
additionnal textual information on the banner page.
pkbanner generates PostScript code, but PyKota
accepts that you pipe its output into any other command if you ever need to use
another file format for your printer.
pkbanner is not meant to be launched from the command line though,
but only through the startingbanner and endingbanner
directives in pykota.conf.
Reference
pkbanner
-v--version
-h--help
-l image
--logo image
-p size
--pagesize size
-s luminosity
--savetoner luminosity
-u link
--url link
additionnal info