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I wrote a scriptable "chooser" when I was at Apple -- it let you programmatically find and select a printer to print to.

I enumerated every printer on campus (about 900 of them at the time, I think), and came /this close/ to printing a snarky page -- a fake version of the "Five Star News" internal company news -- on each one of them. Decided not to; probably a good career move that I resisted that urge.

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Someone did just this in my high school. They nearly got expelled.

Asking from ignorance here, is there a common protocol in use to communicate with printers e.g. find, interact with (print) and query (ask for toner level for instance) them?

Seems it would make a valuable tool for managing a larger number of printers, to know when to switch the toner for instance.

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