On Mon, 15 Nov 2010, Catherine Hunt wrote:
> I'd be very interested to know of anyone else who experiences this
> problem too. Also, how can you constructively let students know in
> advance about the jpeg fix, without making the equipment seem at fault
> or not fit?
We've not had that problem (as we don't have Canon MFDs) but if you've got
some techies on hand that can twiddle with Linux/Unix machines you could
ask them to bring one of those up as a print server and then "tweak" the
PDFs before they get anywhere near the printers (ie convert them to JPEGs
on the fly for example). A Perl script for example could sit in the Linux
print system, spot a "dodgy" PDF, pass it through pdf2ps (or a pipe of
pdftoppm and ppmtojpeg if the JPEG thing is some sort of Canon specific
rendering short cut) and then pass it to the printer as normal.
Many, many moon ago I did something similar for the Loughborough
University print system - though it was several iterations of the print
system ago, so unfortunately I can't supply any code as it has long been
consigned to the bit bucket. The biggest issue back then was dealing with
the print spool requirements for design students sending >1GB
CAD/photoshop/etc pictures.
Of course if you're charging students for printing you might already have
some sort of print server in place that could host this sort of hack.
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