Printing Without Printers?

Question

Hi,

This is the situation I am facing. I have developed a web application that allows users to select existing PDF files to be batch printed on selected printers.

However, in the UAT environment, we are not able to attach printers due to the risk to network security. I can arrange to install third-party software, but because of the administrative burden in arranging configuration changes, it would be preferable that the tool can be configured via the database or a simple configuration file.

Given this constraint, how can I replicate printing without the hardware, for both system testing by developers, and user acceptance testing by the customer?

I know this sounds initially appears to this question, but the solution will need to be viable for an end user, not just for developers.

I had thought of creating a printer driver that would take the PDF file and save it to a specified directory with a timestamp as part of the name. I would develop a separate application/web page available to users only on the UAT environment to monitor the contents of this directory and allow users to check the contents of the directory, i.e.select a specific filename and stream the file to the browser. This would allow the end user to check that the file(s) they had selected for printing were being passed to the specified printer.

If you can think of a better solution, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

Regards, MagicAndi.

Answer 1

Try ImagePrinter on SourceForge, sounds exactly what what you need. Well, it'll save you writing your own printer driver to copy the files.

I think your proposed solution is a good one

Answer 2

You can set up a Microsoft EPS printer

I used this tutorial to set it up on my laptop http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahii.html

Answer 3

Do you have the drivers installed? Why not attach the printers to File ports? That'll route the files to disk. However, there can be only one file name, successive prints overwrite the former one. So you'd need to add a folder watcher to rename the files immediately after printing.

What do you mean by the solution has to be viable for end-users? Why do you think your users can't use a File port? Print-to-file is another solution obviously.

I don't see why you need to write a driver. The RedMon port monitor can probably be tailored to generate those timestamped files in a directory of your choice.

Answer 4

If it is Windows there are several utilities like PDFCreator which create virtual printers that allow you to print to PDF.

I believe linux has such utilities too, but I can't name them.

Answer 5

Download http://www.dopdf.com/ Its free and it installs a virtual printer that creates PDFs.

Greetings

Answer 6

Would the MS XPS Document Writer help? This is configured as a printer on the desktop, I don't see why you couldn't set it up on the server too.