History for pkbanner

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CUPS integrated bannering facility can't easily be used from PyKota because one would have to manually configure additional CUPS filters dedicated to the generation of highly dynamic banners as needed by PyKota. In addition it is possible to have several banners and jobs mixed in an unexpected way because of the way CUPS (at least with versions older than <1.2) works.

To fix this problem for good, PyKota can generate its own banners, which can be :

    * Any static file in a format accepted by your printer.

    * 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'.


From kurt.pfeifle@infotec.com Fri Jun 29 10:45:49 +0200 2007
From: kurt.pfeifle@infotec.com
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:45:49 +0200
Subject: CUPS banners: any printable file may be used
Message-ID: <20070629104549+0200@www.pykota.com>

The statement "CUPS banners can only be static PostScript files" is completely false. In fact, CUPS banners can be *any* printable static file (MIME types as they are defined in /etc/cups/*.types on a system): PS, PDF, Image/Graphic formats, TIFF, ASCII and International Text,....

Please correct this error.

From jerome Tue Jun 17 13:48:19 +0200 2008
From: jerome
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:48:19 +0200
Subject: CUPS banners: any printable file may be used
Message-ID: <20080617134819+0200@www.pykota.com>
In-Reply-To: <20070629104549+0200@www.pykota.com>

In fact the important part is "static", not PostScript, although I didn't know CUPS accepted other formats. I've once submitted an STR (#701) to make CUPS allow banners to be generated on the fly. Finally, as stated in http://osdir.com/ml/printing.cups.devel/2007-08/msg00030.html they won't add this feature, that's why I've added it to PyKota, but only now thanks to your message do I understand the answer. I've now fixed this page. Thanks.