codeblog

A while back, I wanted to design some banner pages for a shared network printer that would show the name of the host that sent the request (none of the standard CUPS banners report this). It was easy enough to define a custom banner page:

<Printer lj4200>
...
JobSheets shared-banner none
...
</Printer>

Then, I could drop a modified banner into /usr/share/cups/banners with the filename “shared-banner”. The banner is just a regular PostScript file, so I could muck around with it. While looking at the “standard” banner, I saw some PS variables being used that had been defined by CUPS:

...
  (Job ID: ) RIGHT
  2 copy                % Copy X & Y
  moveto
  ({printer-name}-{job-id}) show
…

I couldn’t find documentation on the available variables, but managed to track down some of the list at cupsGetJobs2 in cups/utils.c:

job-id
job-priority
job-k-octets
job-state
time-at-completed
time-at-creation
time-at-processing
job-printer-uri
document-format
job-name
job-originating-user-name

None of these had the sending host listed, so I continued searching. Additional ones are defined in scheduler/ipp.c, including:

printer-name
job-id
job-billing
job-hold-until
job-sheets
job-media-sheets-completed
job-originating-host-name

“job-originating-host-name” did the trick for my banner:

...
  (Host: ) RIGHT
  moveto
  ({job-originating-host-name}) show
...

I’ve seen some other partial lists, but I haven’t found an official complete list. It’d be handy to see this documented better, since some variables aren’t valid until after the job is processed (job-sheets), so it’s only valid in the trailing banner, not the leading banner.