I gained quite a few fans today at work. Several of our users need to create PDF files on their Windows machines. We have a few copies of Adobe Acrobat but it's a little bit of a pain to create PDFs and not everyone can do it. Now everyone can create a PDF file from any application on their Windows machines just by printing to a special network print queue. Within a few seconds after printing to the queue the PDF file shows up in their Exchange mailbox as an attachment along with the first page as text in the message body. No special software needed on the client and it is completely free and works *perfectly*.
It only takes about 5 minutes to set up and if anyone is interested I will post the details.
Ingredients:
Linux
Samba
Ghostscript
mpack
and a simple script that you can tailor
On a default RedHat 7.2 install you should have everything installed that you need except for mpack, you can find this on
http://www.rpmfind.net/ and I used the mpack-1.5-3.i386.rpm. mpack is just a utility to send a message including an attachment from the command line or a script. There are other ways to do this. And you don't necessarily have to have the script email the PDF as an attachment. You can just as easily have the script copy the PDF to a specific shared location where the user can pick up the file. Use your imagination. In our case it's easy because I can get the NT domain userid in the script from whoever prints to the queue, and the NT domain ID also happens to be the first part of all of our users email addresses so emailing is easy in our case.
Let me know if you want more....
P.S. I also added to the NT domain logon script to have this queue automatically connected when the users log in. No work was required by the user to be given this new ability. I use the standard "HP Color LaserJet PS" driver on the users machines to print to the queue.
[ April 03, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
