In anticipation of purchasing a Z3100, I've been poking around through the available manuals, and came across something quite interesting. One of the features of the Z series is their built-in web server and its job tracking. According to the main user manual, this data is available from the web server as an XML file and that there is a Software Developers Kit for working with the data. The way that my firm will pay for the plotter is through billing our clients for the printing we do for them in house, rather than sending it out at much higher costs per square foot. But the hassle of tracking every square foot we plot could be counter productive. My hope is to develop a script (AppleScript, most likely) to automatically pull that data off the printer and feed it into our invoicing system.
The problem I have is that until I buy the device, I can't get into the post-sales service system, and the pre-sales folks don't seem to be able to figure out who I should contact about the SDK. I'm wondering if anyone here could give me a name and phone or e-mail at HP that could get me on the road to tracking this stuff down.
Also, if anyone here with a Z series printer wouldn't mind sharing the HTML and XML versions of their usage tracking with me, it would help a lot. I'm no XML expert, so I'd like to see one and make sure they are reasonably straight forward to work with.
Thanks!
