[Samba] PDF Print command

[Rashkae]

For those of us who like to simplity our lives and find all those switches
to gs confusing, the ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript works
rather well....

As for a disk share, just create a script (I would use perl, but that's
only cause I'm not as familiar with shell scripting), that scans a given
directory for any ps files, runs the ps2pdf script, saves the ouput pdf in
a designated folder, and use cron to run that every minute.. (Of course,
the better way would be to program your script as a deamon that runs
itself continuously with a small pause between executions.) (Don't forget
to remove or rename the source ps file).

On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Wouter Verhelst wrote:

Since everyone now starts asking me privately how I set up that PDF
Printer, I suppose I'd better post that here instead of privately
replying to everyone interested ;-)

Unfortunately, I don't have the exact script anymore. However, the
procedure is fairly simple: All you need is Samba (obviously), GNU
Ghostscript and a way to get the resulting PDF file to the user; I used
the 'mime-construct' Perl program for that purpose, but there are other
ways too, of course.

The required ghostscript call is as follows:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.ps

You can write a script that takes the path&filename of input.ps and the
username as its input (see the '%s' and '%u' Samba substitutions to get
these) and that gets the result to the user in some way. As said, I used
mime-construct to send the PDF as a MIME-attachement to the user, but
this has its drawbacks in that your mailserver administrator may not
like someone printing a 30Meg .pdf; you may want to look into putting
this in the users' homedirectory or something likewise.

Then, everything else you need to do is to set up a printer share with
the parameter 'print command' set to the name of your script, and
install a PostScript printer driver on the users' computer to print to
your PDF service (Any postscript printer should do; I used an Apple
Laserwriter which worked flawlessly).

Still, I'd like to know whether someone knows a way to achieve something
similar for a disk share ;-)

Regards,

Wouter