Printing a series of numbers

SparkOut SparkOutYNY at gmail.com
Sat Sep 12 17:49:46 EDT 2009



Jérôme Rosat wrote:
> 
> Thanks Craig and JB.
> 
> My problem is not to reload the tray but to stop printing the number  
> (and stop increasing numbers) when the tray is empty.
> 
> I was probably not clear. Sorry for that but english is not my native  
> tongue. In my company we receive approximately 300' 000 mails during a  
> year.  Currently we number each mail with a label preprinted with a  
> number. And we stick the labels to the hand. So, what I want it is to  
> put all mails received during the day in the tray of the printer and  
> print a number on each mail and when the tray is empty, I need to  
> store the last number in my stack and use this number the following  
> day to start again to number mails.
> 
> Jérôme
> 
Ah, I think I get it. You want to print a variable number of serial numbers
on the documents received, which you have placed in the paper tray of your
printer. The first serial number should be yesterday's last serial number
plus 1. So yesterday's range might have been from 19273 to 19411 and today
should start at 19412 and go through until the documents are out (say there
were 100, then tomorrow's first document will be numbered 19512).

Easy (ish) way:
1) Stack your documents in the paper tray and print 1000 serial numbers onto
them starting from (say, as above) 19412.
2) In the morning, look at the output from the printer and determine that
the print run ran out at 19511.
3) Cancel the outstanding print queue
4) Set rev to store 19512 as the new start serial number of the print run.
5) Collect up today's documents and put them in the print tray.
6) Print 1000 serial numbers onto the documents, starting at the figure
recorded in step 4.
7) Go home
8) In the morning look at the output from the printer and determine that the
print run ran out at 19643.
9) Cancel the outstanding print queue.
10) Set rev to store 19644 as the new start serial number of the print run.
11) onwards, repeating the appropriate steps as necessary.

More technical way - possibly/probably printer/platform dependent:
Find out what SNMP/html/scripting methods there are for interrogating the
print queues.
Some printers have an interface for reporting status, and some OS scripting
can be employed. I can't give you any pointers about SNMP at all. It may be
worth checking if you could get any information from the given printer by
checking in a web browser. If you can, then you could probably use rev to
get the url of the printer status page, and parse the data returned to
extract information about the paper situation. If you did this in a repeat
loop before sending your next serial number print job you could get rev to
tell whether it is safe to print the next number or wait for your return to
stack the new lot of documents in the paper tray. If the last print job was
reported OK and the printer status says paper is not out, then add 1 to the
serial number and print, else exit the repeat loop.
If on Windows, you could use WMI scripting by getting rev to "do" a vbscript
with WMI interrogation of the printer status to verify that the last print
job did not fail and the status is ready and similarly you could put that
script in the loop and depending on result returned from the WMI
interrogation, either advance the count and print again or exit the loop and
wait for you to start again with new documents the next day.
If on Mac, I imagine there may be something vaguely similar in Applescript,
or Linux maybe some shell scripting, but I have no idea.
On Windows, there is some vbscript which you can look at, which shows some
WMI interrogation on printing (as well as lots of other stuff) here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/guide/sas_prn_overview.mspx?mfr=true

I don't know if any of that is useful, but hope it helps.
S/O
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