I am running CUPS, and Samba.

Currently there is one printer, hanging off a PARPORT on a Slack 11 system. Lots of Slack boxes. Some XP laptops. Everything seems to run OK.

What I want to do is utilize N-up printing, but some packages make it inconvenient to set command line parameters for a lp incantation. So what I'd like to do is setup discrete printer for each variant of N-up.
Like MainPrinter-1 MainPrinter-2 MainPrinter-4 for a 1-up, 2-up and 4-up printing, all on the same physical output device. Each of the queues would have a specification like -o number-up=4.

Does anyone know how to do this type of configuration?

I've poured through the CUPS documentation, done a ton of searches, and in general, been unable to determine how to accomplish this.

Thanks for any ideas!

Well, I thought this would be easy, and maybe fun to set up. It wasn't....

I read the cups documentation ( http://www.cups.org/doc-1.1/sum.html#4_3_4 )

I installed a second instance of my printer (HPLJ6-4-up).
I opened a terminal window, and became root. I gave the command lpoptions -p HPLJ6-4-up -o number-up=4.
I checked that this had worked:
[root@box root]# lpoptions -p HPLJ6-4-up
job-sheets=none,none number-up=4
[root@box root]#

But when I print to this printer, the lights on the printer flash as the data is transferred to the printer, but then nothing happens.
So I am as puzzled as you are. Maybe my cups is too old (V1.1.18)?
I will be interested in the solution if you manage to solve this problem!

I have not solved it yet. Anyone else have any ideas?