Program to control server printer

[rtshort]

Can someone point me in the right direction if it's possible. I've done some programming but I'm certainly not an expert by any means.

I have a school with the printer connected to a print server at the main desk. They want to be able to control what's printed. In other words, when the student clicks on print, the print server needs to recieve a message and the instructor ok it before it's printed to stop paper waste.

Rob
Just my $.02.

 

[TLowder]

Not sure if you're explaining clearly. "Print server needs to recieve a message". By print server do you mean a hardware device attached between a printer and network cable? I doubt you can control the print server at all, but you can control the windows print spooler. "when the student clicks print", Do you mean a print button in your VB app or any print job from any app? If it is directly from your VB app, how does your app print?
I suspect you mean any print job from any app. If this is true, I would just use an existing program and not write my own. Unless your going to sell the app or adding this feature to an existing app, it probably wouldn't be worth the time writing.

These might be what your looking for -

http://www.winsite.com/Utilities/Printers/Remote-Queue-Manager-Personal/

or

http://www.winsite.com/Utilities/Printers/Print-Censor-Personal/

I know nothing about these programs or the site I found them on, but I suspect this is what you're looking for. They have pro and enterprise versions too.

Tom

 

[rtshort]

TLowder, thanks for the response.

I want it to control the "network printer" in a school, library or internet cafe etc. so when a student/patron clicks print from any app it will not print until the teacher/librarian releases it.

People will open a multipage document such as a PDF that contains 50+ pages and click print when all they want is the current page that they are viewing. The printer at the desk prints all of the pages of course and in the case where they actually charge for pages printed, the patron doesn't want to pay for the extra pages, just the ones they want.

I guess it's the spooler that I'm talking about.

Thanks for the links and I did find another after changing my search terms around and looking for an hour or so. If anyone else runs across this thread looking for the same thing, here's the link:

http://www.printeradmin.com/printer-manager.htm

I would still like to write one myself if it's possible and I imagine that it would be since there are others in existance, I just don't know if that's possible with VB?

Rob
Just my $.02.

 

[TLowder]

I'm sure its possible, but the reason I suggested existing programs is that I doubt it would be easy. Since you aren't just opening the document, you need to read it in the spooler format. Then you may have issues with different printer commands from different brands. You would pretty much just pause all jobs, then resume the approved ones. As far as someone printing 50 pages when they just need the current one; I'm not sure if it would be easy to break appart certain pages but you could just have the mod deny the print job, then the user resends the page needeed. I don't know though, it may not be too difficult. It sounds interesting. I'd be curious to hear back if you do develop the app.

I was too curious and did some more looking into this and found you should search for "EMF Spool Viewer". I guess EMF is a more universal format, that will eliminate my previous concerns of different formats for different brands and different pcl commands etc. I saw quite a few .net examples but there are probably VB6 examples out there too. It now looks to be a lot easier than I first thought.

Good luck!

Tom

 

[strongm]

>if it's possible

Well, sure, to a certain extent. How comfortable are you with API functions in general, API callback functions more specifically, and API change notification objects?

 

[rtshort]

Yeah, that's about all I want to do is pause the printer and let Admin resume it after it's approved. It won't be necessary to try to get the right page to print out of 50 or so, they can just delete it and then show the student/patron how to print the pages they want correctly.

Strongm, I'm not very familiar with API's at all so I'll probably just used the one that I found. It goes far more into detail than what they really need (setting up accounts, amount per page etc.), but they can do the job with it.

Thanks to you both and have a great week.

Rob
Just my $.02.