Posted by Dave Lists on 10/25/05 16:47

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.

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