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Is there a way to intercept and change an item that was sent to a printer?
Fuzz
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I don't know if there's a better way phrase that..
Basically, my girlfriend and I print a lot of coupons from various websites and save hundreds of dollars every week. Like, seriously.
Which is good, because we're poor college kids. Unfortunately, we waste a lot of money on printer ink and paper because these coupons purposely waste it. Like, the coupon will be like 3 inches by 3 or something, but the rest of the page is filled with needless pictures and graphics or models. The worst part of it is they use some browser based printing program that sends it straight to your printer without letting you change it to black and white..
So, we'll get several pages that each have one coupon and are in black and white.. but they waste all our color ink making it black and white.
Is there some way to "catch" an item that is sent to the printer, so that I can edit it, and save on ink and paper?
Is that legal?
Basically, my girlfriend and I print a lot of coupons from various websites and save hundreds of dollars every week. Like, seriously.
Which is good, because we're poor college kids. Unfortunately, we waste a lot of money on printer ink and paper because these coupons purposely waste it. Like, the coupon will be like 3 inches by 3 or something, but the rest of the page is filled with needless pictures and graphics or models. The worst part of it is they use some browser based printing program that sends it straight to your printer without letting you change it to black and white..
So, we'll get several pages that each have one coupon and are in black and white.. but they waste all our color ink making it black and white.
Is there some way to "catch" an item that is sent to the printer, so that I can edit it, and save on ink and paper?
Is that legal?
Fuzz on
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Might work.
edit: Might work as in, they may or may not accept the coupon. It's not illegal since you're not forging the coupon.
As for the question - have you tried printing to a file? You can usually set up a "printer" that actually just writes the print spooler's output to a file on your local machine.
You could also rather easily "Print Screen" and then edit the coupons all on one page for printing with some cut 'n paste.
They don't let you see the coupon at all, only when it's physically in your hands after printing.
Also, I'll do a little more research on it, my girlfriend does it mostly, I just cut the coupons out really. She goes to these websites and spends a lot of time planning our grocery shopping. And really, it depends on what you're getting. Like, I'll spend $50 on monday at my grocery store and save like $50, and then later in the week I might do it again, as well as spending money on other things like entertainment or whatever.
I know one of the sites is www.hip2save.com.
Also, benefits and savings are directly related to where you live. I live in Florida, home of Publix.. the best grocery store ever. So.. yeah, your millage may vary.
What's this printing to a pdf thing?
Part of the reason stores are even willing to accept these coupons is that they've been assured by the companies that provide them there's no way for someone to alter the coupon on their computer before it gets printed.
Yes. Publix has a crazy ton of coupons always active. On any day of the week two or more things I'd need will be buy one get one free, and usually discounted to boot. I use their cupons occasionally, though I'd say you save about a dollar for every ten you spend... if you are consistent with them. That usually takes more effort than I care to use, though.
Which is neat.
I've often times found it cheaper to buy offbrand than to buy main brand with coupons. Like, when I say often times, I mean all the time.
Sure I may get $2 off 3 12-packs of coke ($15 where I live), but if I buy Wegman's Brand soda I only pay about $10 for 3 of them. Now when you get coupon's for off brand name stuff, that's where the real deals are!
God I love you Wegmans.
So like, you save a dollar or two with each coupon, but with all three coupons you can get some items for -$1 or $2.
Do that several times and you can get huge savings. That first time that you save more than you spend is amazing.. and then when you save double what you spend..
It's kinda a rush, more so for my girlfriend..
This is why Publix rocks. Their deals are the main brands, buy-1-get-1-free, then discounted to lower than the generic price. They do sales on the generic stuff too, all the time.
Five 2 liter bottles of delicious Dr. Publix for $1.00? Booyah!
Install this:
http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp
It will install itself as a "Printer" on your machine. Print to that "printer" and a dialog will pop up and ask you where you want to save the PDF.
Then you'd screenshot, edit, and re-print.
But if you do this much printing you might be better served by buying a laser printer. It turns out that pencil lead is a lot cheaper than unicorn blood.
Not saying this definitely won't work. But in my experience these coupon websites check to see that you are printing to a physical printer. I've actually run into problems sometimes because I have a 3-in-1 printer and the coupon site could tell and wouldn't print to a device that could do more than print.
They really, really want to prevent people from being able to photoshop coupons and make them $2.00 off instead of $1.00 off, for instance, because as soon as people are able to do that stores will just stop accepting them.
It's also really easy to circumvent too. Unless these websites install some sort of spyware to verify shit like physical ports on the PC, it could probably be easily fooled with modifying the page's JS or making the page believe the PDF printer is actually attached to LPT1. Or using a Serial->Network driver that then prints to a PDF printer on the opposite machine.
If the website is sending it directly to the printer without prompting you, set the pdf printer as the default printer.
Damn.. Like, isn't it all bar code based anyway? I tried emailing some of the places about their abuse of my ink and paper and they're just like "oh.. sorry."
How do I do that?
They basically do install spyware.
All you'd have to do is alter the bar code so it's not recognizable, and then the clerk would manually enter the coupon amount. Happens all the time with coupons so it's not like it would really raise a flag.
I'm not saying don't try any of the solutions people have posted, but don't bang your head against the wall too much. These companies have a lot of incentive to prevent people from doing what you are trying to do.
Man, I hate that there's that.. "oh, you can't do this because someone could use this to steal" shit.
Man..
man.
I don't know if that'll work well with Publix though.. I think they insist on keeping the coupons.
Also I hate all of you that have stores which do this crazy coupon shit because I would totally be getting paid to shop if I had them in my area. :x
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
I don't know what the legality is of using those coupons, but I personally would not use them.
Umm, the websites we go to link directly to manufacturer's websites for their coupons, and other official coupon sites. There's never a time where it's like "oh, use this coupon" and it's on photobucket or something, they're always from manufacturer related or approved sites.
and they're never that good, I'm afraid.
The "sweet deals" come from using several official coupons, like a grocery store one from their flier, one from a competitor's flier, and another from the manufacturer.
Doubt it--the coupon-printing software is legit, and all it does is determine how many times you've printed a coupon and then sends the coupon to your printer. You could pull up your Task Manager and see if anything weird is taking up resources.