This utility monitors the number of pages printed by a range of QuickDraw printers, keeps you informed of the number of pages printed and warns you when your Printer cartridge is close to running out, so that you can either refill or replace it.
This program will run on Colour and Black and White Macs, but requires System 7.
This utility owes its original inspiration to Sven Jakubithﾕ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, and is not redistributed in modified form. 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
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). Please send cash if possible. I can only accept cheques if they are made out in Pounds and drawn on a UK bank (for example, International Money orders).
Please send the registration fee to :-
Mr. S.J. Smith,
9 Farm Close,
Ringwood,
Hampshire.
BH24 1RZ
United Kingdom
I have enclosed a registration form for your convenience, but you donﾕt have to use it if you donﾕt want to.
Please enclose information about yourself, especially your email
address, (if you have one), the version number of PrintUseMonitor that you have, and where you got it from. If you send me an email address, I can send your registration code to you quickly and also support you with any future updates to PrintUseMonitor.
My email address is :-
smiths@ferndown.ate.slb.com
Steve Smith
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What's new in Version 3.4?
Version 3.4 adds a major improvement, the prediction of the cartridge expiry date. This will displayed at the bottom of the ﾔcountingﾕ dialog, but only if sufficient data is available to PUM. In order to predict the cartridge expiry date, provided the cartridge installation date is known. PUM stores this date whenever you press the ﾔClear Logﾕ button. Once this date is available, the date that your printer cartridge is expected to expire will be displayed alongside a ﾔRest In Peaceﾕ icon, after 5 days and at least 10 pages have been printed. This date is based on your average usage, which should be fine for most people, but if you suddenly decide to print off a 150 page dissertation it will be wrong!
There are other improvements too. When you press the ﾔClear Logﾕ button, your old log file is renamed to show the range of dates that the cartridge was used over, (if the installation date is known). I have also fixed a bug where the ﾔQuitﾕ and ﾔSaveﾕ buttons would become greyed out after pressing the ﾔFind Logﾕ button.
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 printer 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, and displays a progress bar representing the pages printed. If the total number of pages printed is greater than the maximum (which you can change), a warning message is displayed.
It does this for log files from a range of printers and a variety of languages. This version supports the following printers :-
StyleWriter I (when the SWII or SW1200 driver is used)
StyleWriter II
ColorStyleWriter Pro
Color SW 2400
LaserWriter 300
StyleWriter 1200
Color SW 2200
Color SW 1500
Color SW 2500
and the following languages :-
English
French
German
Italian
Swedish
Dutch
Danish
Japanese
Spanish
Installation
This version can be stored anywhere on your hard-disk. It can also be run from a CD ROM drive.
This program relies on a feature built into the Apple Printer Drivers called ﾒKeep Log of Printer Useﾓ. You must turn this option on before you can start using PrintUseMonitor. To do this, go to the Chooser and select your printer. A ﾒSetupﾓ button should appear. Press this.
A second dialog will appear. Make sure that the option called ﾒKeep Log of Printer Usageﾓ is checked. Now print something, and the printer log file should be created.
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Launch PUM and tell it where the printer log file is located. 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.
Once installed, double-click PrintUseMonitor to launch it. You will be directed to the ﾔSetupﾕ dialog.
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You must use the ﾒFind Log Fileﾓ button 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. There are also a number of additional things that you can set up by using the ﾒPreferencesﾓ button.
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When you have finished, press the ﾔSave Settingsﾕ button to save your changes.
When running, PrintUseMonitor will display a bar-graph on the screen representing print cartridge usage.
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You can change the preferences by clicking on the ﾔChange Setupsﾕ button anytime that the dialog is displayed. If sufficient data is available, then the predicted cartridge expiry date will be displayed at the bottom of the dialog.
I suggest that you run PrintUseMonitor on start-up by making an alias to PrintUseMonitor and moving it to the ﾔStartup Itemsﾕ 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 ﾔcook the booksﾕ a bit. One way is to have a guess at how many pages you have printed so far, and then reduce the ﾒMax Pagesﾓ number by this amount.
Replacing Print Cartridges
If you replace or renew your print cartridge, be sure to clear the log file so that counting starts again from zero. You should use the ﾔClear Log Fileﾕ button in the Setup Dialog to do this. This will rename your old log file (adding the date to the name) and create a new - empty log file. It also stores the cartridge installation date in the Prefs file. This date is used to calculate the cartridge expiry date, which is shown at the bottom of the counting dialog.
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 + 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.
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, it is possible to run 2 copies of PUM, one for each printer, although you will need to alter one copy of PUM with ResEdit to change the name of the Preferences file. This is held in the STR resource, ID 128. I am quite willing to send you a special version if you email a request to me. I hope to overcome this restriction in a future version.
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 (or the SW1200 driver) with SW1 printers.
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.
PrintUseMonitor does not work with QuickDraw GX or HP printers, because these printer drivers do not have the ﾒKeep log fileﾓ option that PUM relies on.
Troubleshooting
If you encounter problems, please work through the installation instructions and ensure that you have set everything up properly. Make sure that the ﾒKeep Log of Printer Usageﾓ option is selected in the printer driver (accessed from the Chooser). This is the most common installation problem.
If you don't even have the ﾔPrinting Prefsﾕ folder inside the ﾔPreferencesﾕ folder inside the ﾔSystem Folderﾕ, 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 drivers do 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, or reduce your maximum pages to take account of this effect.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help in the development of this Utility :-
