Tracking Printer Trays

PaperCut NG/MF is not able to detect different tray selections (unless they are loaded with different paper sizes). At a technical level this is very difficult as each driver implements tray selection using different methods - there isn’t one standard. We may consider tray selection as a future feature on selected popular printer models, however, in the meantime consider the options presented below.

The main reason for needing to track at the printer-tray level is to charge different amounts for special paper such as transparencies and/or photo quality paper. There are two possible options to achieve this objective within the current functionality:

1. It is possible to setup costs for print jobs by using the Print Charging feature.

2. Use multiple print queues, per printer, with different default tray selections (see below).

Set up tray rates using multiple queues:

Charging different amounts for different trays can be achieved by implementing multiple print queues that map to the same physical printer. Each logical print queue has a different default tray and the tray selection settings are restricted so they can’t be changed by end users. For example:

• Printer XYZ Standard Paper (locked default to Tray 1)
• Printer XYZ Transparency (locked default to Tray 2)

Then it is possible to set different costs on the logical printers (representing trays) inside PaperCut NG/MF.