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Split Print Job to Color and B&W?
cheros writes "I work in an office which has various printers, and printing documents with a few color diagrams in is actually a pain. Due to the high cost of the color prints the preference is to use B&W, and print the color pages separately (with obviously an finishing stage to collate and merge the two). Is there a print filter that would automatically split the PostScript print job into a feed for two different queues? (and yes, we use B&W drawings where possible ;-)."
I have a Xerox XPrint 4920 Plus colour laser printer here, and I see where you're coming from with this question. The thing I'm wondering is why the printer you have doesn't do the job-splitting for you... Colour toners for this bad-boy cost about $350 CDN each (C,M,Y) and the black toner is only about 60-80 bucks CDN. The difference in price (and speed, as B&W prints come out at 12ppm vs. 3ppm for colour) means that I can use this printer for both my colour and black&white needs. Obviously, B&W is higher quantity, and when printing mixed documents, it seems stupid to print through the CMYK process... Well, here's where the printer gets smart -- it doesn't print the pure B&W pictures through the CMYK process. It appears that the printer figures out that it only needs the black toner and just sends the page there. I don't see why you would need to split the actual printers if the printer *should* be doing the splitting for you (and keeping costs down adequately). I guess the particular printer you're using must have a very expensive black toner... NOTE: The XPrint 4920 Plus was introduced in '95 and is by no means a 'new' printer.