[ILUG] PDF Creation

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 04:52:36PM +0100 or thereabouts, Declan Grady wrote:
> Is there anyhting available which can run like a print server, but create
> PDF files, instead of producing printed output ?
> 
> Thinking of an smb print server, for windows clients, with one HP printer,
> and one PDF-Writer -like printer.
> 
> Whats the catch ?

Yeah, did that.  May still have scripts lying around.  They'll be in the
ILUG archive though.

Basically what you need is/are:

1. A samba shared *directory* (not printer!) mounted as a drive in windows.
2. A postscript printer in windows configured to write to file.
3. A sweeper script[0] running in the samba server that looks for any *.ps in
   the samba shared directory and converts that to pdf.  (Samba is supposed
   to be capable of running a command for every something or other happening
   (eg. file open) with a share which should be able to fire up the ps2pdf
   converter but I never got that aspect to work)

Now, to generate pdf, the windows user prints to this postscript printer,
selects the designated drive to save the file to and calls it a .ps  After a
decent interval, the file should appear as a .pdf instead of a .ps

The limitations to this approach are that you don't get to use any of pdf's
indexing and linking capabilities since postscript won't carry these through
the print-to-file process.  If you want "proper" pdf you'll need to get hold
of a dedicated pdf generating package.

Conor

[0] ps2pdf-sweeper

#!/bin/bash

loop:  #Does this work in bash?
for i in `*.ps`; do
ps2pdf $i > `basename $i ps`pdf
rm $i
done

sleep 60
goto loop
-- 
Conor Daly 
Met Eireann, Glasnevin Hill, Dublin 9, Ireland
Ph +353 1 8064217 Fax +353 1 8064275
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