This utility monitors the number of pages printed by a range of QuickDraw printers and warns you when your Printer cartridge is close to running out, so that you can either refill or replace it.
This utility owes its original inspiration to Sven Jakubith’s StyleWriter II PageNum utility.
This program is share-ware, and is subject to the usual terms and conditions. It can be freely distributed, as long as it is distributed with all its original documentation. The author does not bear any responsibility if anything goes wrong as a result of running this program. Rather than coding it as a system extension, I have made it an application that just runs once and quits, so it does not hog any memory and should not conflict with any other applications/extensions/control panels that may be running on your machine.
Shareware Fee
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You may try the program out for 30 days, but after that you must register the program within another 30 days. The registration fee is £5 (UK) or 10$ (US). No cheques please as the bank charges for converting to UK currency exceeds the value of the cheque.
Please send the registration fee to :-
Mr. S.J. Smith,
9 Farm Close,
Ringwood,
Hampshire.
BH24 1RZ
United Kingdom
Please enclose information about yourself, especially your email
address, (if you have one), and the version number of PrintUseMonitor that you have. If you send me an email address, I can send your registration code to you quickly and also support you with any updates to PrintUseMonitor.
My email address is :-
smiths@ferndown.ate.slb.com
Steve Smith
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What's new in Version 3.0?
Version 3.0 adds a totally new user interface to PUM, making it much easier to install and use. It also adds support for the new StyleWriter 1200 printer, and this driver when used with the older SW1 and SWII printers. This version supports a number of languages, see the file "Support for other languages" if this applies to you. This version also includes support for other printers, including the "ColorStylewriter Pro" and the "Personal LaserWriter 300" printers.
How it Works
PrintUseMonitor examines the printer log file (called by various names depending on the type of printer you are using and the language the system has been localised to). This log file is a TeachText/SimpleText document that is created (optionally) and updated by the Printer Driver whenever a document is printed.
Each time a document is printed, the driver adds an entry containing the number of pages that were printed, the time, the application that printed them, and so on.
PrintUseMonitor processes this file, finds all the lines that start "Number of pages printed: nnn", totals up all the pages printed and ends up with the grand total printed so far. If the total number of pages printed is greater than the maximum (which can be specified by the user), a warning message is displayed. If the number of pages printed is less than this number then the Application exits automatically.
Installation
Earlier versions of PrintUseMonitor had to be installed in the same location as the Printer's Log file, but this version can be stored anywhere on your hard-disk.
The name of the log file and its location vary, depending on the language being used by the system. On English systems, it can be found in : "System Folder:Preferences:Printing Prefs".
The log file is called by various names, depending on the type of printer that is in use "StyleWriter Log", "StyleWriter II Log", "StyleWriter 1200 Log", "Color SW Pro Log", "Color SW 2400 Log" and "LaserWriter 300 Log" for example.
This version requires System 7 to run.
Once installed, double-click PrintUseMonitor to launch it. You will be directed to the ‘Setup’ dialog. The most important thing to do here is to locate the Log file in the Printing Prefs folder on your hard disk. You should also select the type of printer and the language that your system is localised to. You can also adjust the Maximum Pages number from this dialog.
When running, PrintUseMonitor will display a bar-graph on the screen representing print cartridge usage. You can change the setup by clicking on the ‘Change Setups’ button anytime that the dialog is displayed.
I suggest that you run PrintUseMonitor on start-up by making an alias to PrintUseMonitor and moving it to the ‘Startup Items’ folder. Thereafter, whenever you start your Mac, PrintUseMonitor will check the contents of the Printer Log file and warn you if the number of pages printed exceeds the suggested maximum. Note that this is the only time it will be run in this situation. You can also run it at any other time by double clicking PrintUseMonitor.
"Cooking the Books"
Of course, if your Printer Log file was not initialised when you last changed your cartridge, you will have to ‘cook the books’ a bit. One way is to have a guess at how many pages you have printed so far, and then change any one of the "Number of pages printed" lines in the Printer Log file to add this number of pages.
Printer with more than one Print cartridge
Some colour printers have more than one cartridge, one for printing black, and the other to print colours. The maximum in this case should be set according to how much you typically use colour when printing. If it is mainly black and white with the occasional bit of colour then set the maximum to the expected life of the Black cartridge (or slightly higher), assuming that the black cartridge will run out first. If you mainly print in colour then you should set the maximum to slightly higher than the colour cartridge life, on the assumption that the colour cartridge should run out first. In the extreme case, assuming the cartridges are used evenly, you should set the maximum to the expected life of the Black + the colour cartridges. Hopefully, this should give you an idea of the maximum and minimum cartridge life.
Restrictions
This facility only works with certain languages. I can add support for other languages, when requested to do so, although I do need to have samples of the foreign Printer Log file in order to do this, as well as a translation for the messages that I use, see the separate README file called "Support for other Languages" for details.
This version supports the following printers :-
StyleWriter II
ColorStyleWriter Pro
Color SW 2400
LaserWriter 300
StyleWriter 1200
If you are lucky enough to have more than one of these printers, I am afraid that PrintUseMonitor will only work with one of them. However, you could run a different version of PUM for each printer type.
PrintUseMonitor does not work with the StyleWriter 1 driver, as this driver does not have the facility to keep a log file. However, you can install the SWII driver with SW1 printers, or the StyleWriter 1200 driver.
PrintUseMonitor can potentially support any printer that keeps a log file. I suspect that the LaserWriter 310 printer also supports a log file facility. I am keen to add support for these printers and would appreciate it if anyone can email me with the log files for printers that I don't yet support.
Troubleshooting
Most, if not all problems are due, in my experience, with the installation. If PrintUseMonitor does not work then I suggest that you work through the Installation instructions carefully and follow the "Testing" section of these instructions.
If you don't even have the ‘Printing Prefs’ folder inside the ‘Preferences’ folder inside the ‘System Folder’, then this may be because you have not installed the Printer driver properly. These folders should be created by the Printer Driver install disks, but you should also be able to create them by hand. If you do, make sure that you get the folder names exactly right!
Known Problems
I have noticed that the Apple StyleWriter driver does not always record the correct number of pages printed. This seems to happen whenever you print multiple copies of a document. The work-round is to edit the log file after this has happened and put the correct numbers in by hand.
If the log files gets above a certain size, you can no longer edit it using TeachText, I don't think that SimpleText suffers from this same problem. However, it is just a text file so you can use any editor on it. If you just want to reinitialise it then you can simply delete the Printer Log file and a new one will be created the next time a document is printed.
Acknowledgments
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I would like to thank the following people for their help in the development of this Utility :-
