Re: PDF printing under windows.

Richard Lynch wrote:

On Mon, October 24, 2005 1:48 pm, Dave Lists wrote:

I'm generating PDFs under windows using PDFlib and all is easy. What I am wondering though, and google reveals nothing usefull, can I print the PDF to a network printer from windows? I'm presuming to print the file I would ahve to use COM and open it under Acrobat? Anyone done this before and have any pointers? I'm printing out invoices and what to automate the task.

If, for some weird reason, you want to allow the user (authenticated, logged in, trusted) to print to a networked computer on the WEB SERVER, then your best bet is probably to figure out how to print that PDF from MS-DOS and then to use http://php.net/exec to print it, I would guess... It's from a cli PHP install on a local machine :-)

You might be able to use PHP to open up a COM object to convince Adobe/Windows/whatever to print... COM makes me want to cry ;-) At the moment I'm trying to convince OpenOffiice it wants to play with PHP and COM.

I have tried to exec print on the windows box but that just hung.

If it was a Un*x server, you'd just send the document to lpr or CUPS or something, and be done with it, probably in a half-hour of work, even allowing for a protracted battle with file/exec permissions. I'm not sure I could just fire a PDF at lpr, but no doubt it would be much easier under Unix :-)

Dave.