System Administration Guide: Solaris Printing

Printing Banner Pages by Using LP Print Commands

A banner page identifies who submitted the print request, the print request ID, and when the request was printed. A banner page also has a modifiable title to help users identify their printouts.

Banner pages make identifying the owner of a print job easy, which is especially helpful when many users submit jobs to the same printer. However, printing banner pages uses more paper and might be unnecessary if a printer has only a few users. In some cases, printing banner pages is undesirable. For example, if a printer has special paper or forms mounted, such as paycheck forms, printing banner pages might cause problems.

By default, the print service forces banner pages to be printed. However, you can give users a choice to turn off printing of a banner page when they submit a print request. You can set this choice through the lpadmin command or through Solaris Print Manager. If you give the users a choice, they have to use the -o banner option to turn off banner page printing.

Also, if you don't need or want banner pages, you can turn off banner pages so that they are never printed. You can turn off banner page printing by using the lpadmin command or through Solaris Print Manager.

Table 5–2 Banner Page Printing

Command Used 

Banner Page Printing 

Override? 

lpadmin -p printer -o banner OR

lpadmin -p printer -o banner=always

Required and printed 

If you are a regular user and use p -o nobanner, the request is printed. However, the nobanner argument is ignored.

If you are superuser (root), or another privileged user, the nobanner argument is honored.

lpadmin -p printer -o nobanner

lpadmin -p printer -o banner=optional

On by default, but can be disabled on a per request basis with the lp -o nobanner command

Not applicable. 

lpadmin -p printer -o banner=never

Disabled 

No, if you are a regular user. If you are superuser (root), or the lp user, you can override this option to cause the generation of a burst page.