Separate color from black-and-white pages for printing

Question

My organization has a leased color printer. We pay a per-page cost to the lessor, and the color page cost is far greater than the black-and-white page cost. Our users are pretty good about selecting the correct mode. But the problem comes when they want to print a big job that has only a few color pages. They don't want to manually search through the job to find the color pages and separate them out, and management would like them to not print hundreds of B&W pages at color costs.

For example, imagine a printer where B&W pages cost 1¢ and color pages cost 8¢. A user wants to print a 200 page document. Most of the pages are just black text, but there are ten pages of color diagrams. The user wants to get the diagrams printed in color, but the only way for him to do that is to print the whole job in "color", costing $16, or manually find the ten color pages, print them separately for 80¢, then print the rest of the document for $1.80, for a total of $2.60, or forego the color pages altogether and just print the whole thing in B&W for $2.

Is there a piece of software than can automatically find the color pages in a print job, send those pages to the color printer, and then print the rest of the job to a B&W printer? What would be ideal is some sort of print filter so that the user could just print the whole job as a color job, and the software would intercept it, chop it up based on which pages were in color, and send each segment to the appropriate printer. I've found PaperCutNG, which does exactly what I want, but, honestly, it's not worth the money for that one feature. I was hoping to find a free solution.

My print server is a Windows 2003 machine, and a solution that runs there would be preferable, but I can transition to a different OS if needed. A client-side solution would also be acceptable.

Solution 1

wfaulk, how did you get on with this?

we have had this feature working for a long time.

its something that should be done in the print driver itself... changing automatically between mono & colour on the fly.

worth checking what options your manufacturer give you, different drivers perhaps.

As someone posted above, some of the print accounting sofwares do this.. and work out a charge but they are just using the print driver as provided.

Solution 2

You can use this utility from Microsoft to split PDF on two documents containing only colour and only grayscale (black and white) pages

Solution 3

Check out PDFsam: a free, open source utility for (you guessed it) splitting and merging PDFs. You may be able to script it to get it to do what you want.

Comments

[wfaulk]

This answers the wrong question. I want a single job to be split between color and B&W printers, not force my users to not print in color. I've updated the question with a clearer example.

[wfaulk]

The problem isn't so much doing the splitting as it is determining which pages are color and which aren't, and then automating the task of sending the appropriate pages to the appropriate printer.

[Oskar Duveborn]

+1 This is what I would have answered - this should be done by the printer itself (perhaps not the driver though) and the bigger volume printers I've seen leased have often had this detection and separation of color and non-color pages built-in, completely automatic and correctly updating the metrics. Having to manually decide this seems like a very old-school trick to exhaust more money out of the users ^^

[MartinC]

It depends on the printer manufacturer. Ricoh, Tally and HP all work. some do work fine at the hardware level, others the driver is definitely part of the mechanism and important - can certainly affect the output & number of pages charged. for example, some applications like IE or Outlook printing an odd number of pages in double sided mode - the driver will force a blank back page. Result - the happy MFD/ print manufacturer getting an extra 2c/2p on potentially millions of pages across their leased devices.