Printers and Pricing Schedules

[sekjal]

For Libki 26.02, I'm looking to move printer configuration from out of the Settings table and its own dedicated section of Administration.

The "Printers" area will include a place to define the physical printers Libki is able to interact with. Rather than having to define multiple printers for each combination of chroming and plexing, this area will allow users to define whether the particular printer supports color and/or duplex (and if it's short side, long side or both). Whether the printer is PrintManager or CUPS will also be defined here.

Print Pricing Schedules will be defined separately, and allow for the definition of 4 different per-page prices:

1. B&W Simplex
2. B&W Duplex
3. Color Simple
4. Color Duplex
   Printers will be configured to use a specific Price Schedule. This is kept separate from the Printer's settings to both reduce duplication of data when dealing with multiple printers, and to possibly support different pricing for different user groups, should such a feature be desired in the future.

While the goal is maintain backwards compatibility with this change, I hope to be able to streamline print driver installation on the Client side, since we'll no longer need to configure multiple printers for each combination of chroming/plexing. These values will be easy to change at print release time (though only to options supported by the selected printer).

Seeking comments, questions, and criticisms on this plan before getting too far with development.

[sekjal]

One side effect of this change will be that chroming and plexing will be associated with the Print Job, rather than the Printer itself. Compatibility checks will need to be done at certain points to ensure that the selected Printer supports the chroming/plexing desired.

Libki Print Station will need to be updated to reflect this change. Libki Print Manager shouldn't need to be, as those values are passed in the API call on a per-job level already