9. Banner Printing

One of the more difficult administrative issues is whether to print banners (job separators) or to save the large amount of wasted paper, time and effort. The LPRng and ifhp combination provide a rather esoteric set of methods to generate banners, at least one of which should be suitable for your application.

You should be aware that some printers have the obnoxious habit of generating their own banner pages when jobs are transferred via the RFC1179 protocol. You should consult the manufacturers documentation and take the necessary steps to turn printer banner page generation off.

9.1 Banner Printing with LPRng

The following steps need to be done to configure LPRng to print banners using ifhp.

1. In order to print a banner, the LPRng print spooler will require a user name for the banner page to be present in the print job. However, since users can request no banner via various options on the print spooler interface, LPRng provides the handy force_banner option to always force a banner to be generated, even if the user has specifically requested that one not be generated. This is useful for preventing the disappearing print job syndrome in large installations.
2. Next, LPRng must be configured to generate banners. The sh (suppress header) option must be off (sh@).
3. At this point you need to decide if you want LPRng to generate the banner of the ifhp filter to generate the banner. If you want LPRng to generate the banner, you can specify a banner generation program, and inform ifhp not to generate a banner (the default).

   Printcap:
   lp:
     :sh@
     :banner=/usr/local/filters/bannergen
     :if=ifhp -Tbanner
   

4. If you want ifhp to generate a banner, you do not have LPRng generate a banner and enable banner printing by ifhp. You also can specify the sb or short banner option, which will cause a very short dummy banner to be generated. This will be ignored by the ifhp filter.

   Printcap:
   lp:
     # short banner, save effort
     :sh@:sb
     :if=ifhp -Tbanner
   

5. Finally, you have your choice of PCL, PostScript and even Text banners. These can be specified using banner=language:

   Printcap: lp:
  # short banner, save effort
  :sh@:sb
  :if=ifhp -Tbanner=language


9.2 Stand Alone Banner Program

Occasionally it is useful to be able to generate a banner in standalone mode. For example, you might want to generate a banner when using an LPRng bounce queue to perform filtering operations before forwarding jobs to another printer. To do this requires a stand-alone banner printer. ifhp can be configured to do this by using:

ifhp -Tbanner_only

ifhp -Tbanner_only (use default language) OR ifhp -Tbanner_only=language (use specified language)

Lastly, in order to be vintage software compatible, if the ifhp program is invoked as the banner program, then you get the following results

banner -> ifhp -Tbanner_only banner -Tbanner_only=xx -> ifhp -Tbanner_only=xx

For example, to use this with a bounce queue to an hp4 printer, the following printcap entry might be used:

# for clients, force spooling to server
lp:lp=lp@server
# server
lp:server
  :bq=raw@printer
  :ifhp=model=hp4
  :generate_banner
  :banner=/usr/local/filters/ifhp -Tbanner_only
  :if=/usrlocal/filters/ifhp
  :of=/usrlocal/filters/ifhp