bespoke printing with acrobat and perl

[jimbo2112]

Hi All,

First post here!

I am running Perl 5.8 on NT 4.0

I have set up an FTP print server which automates the printing of any
pdf dropped into a watched folder before sending it to a holding area
where, after 3 days, it will be deleted.

I need to make the process more sophistcated by having 3 ftp folders.
These would be to either send it to a mono printer, send to a colour
printer or print only the first page (mono).

The problem I have is that the line command options for Acrobat are
very restricted.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I could plug into the Perl scripts
get what I want? Is there a module that I can use? I am very new to
Perl, so please be gentle with me!

Cheers

Jimbo

[Stephen Patterson]

On 25 Sep 2003 04:15:39 -0700, jimbo2112 wrote:

> The problem I have is that the line command options for Acrobat are
> very restricted.

Hav you tried opening the files with ghostview? If that works OK, you
can use ghostscript to print them, as it supports plenty of command
line options. Just out of interest, what operating system would this
be on?

--
Stephen Patterson [url]http://patter.mine.nu/[/url]
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[Rick Nakroshis]

[email]mjames@bmjgroup.com[/email] (jimbo2112) wrote in
news:41b43f9c.0309250315.33f73030@posting.google.c om:

> I need to make the process more sophistcated by having 3 ftp folders.
> These would be to either send it to a mono printer, send to a colour
> printer or print only the first page (mono).
>
> The problem I have is that the line command options for Acrobat are
> very restricted.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on what I could plug into the Perl scripts
> get what I want? Is there a module that I can use? I am very new to
> Perl, so please be gentle with me!

Take a look at the commandline switches for Acrobat Reader. I remember
seeing something that showed you could either give it the name of the PDF
and a single letter switch (/p or something like that) or else you could
specify which printer driver and which print queue to send it to. That
ought to solve the mono vs color printing.

As for printing only the first page, you might want to look at the
PDF::API2 module. You could extract the first page of a PDF with it, and
send that to the printer.

Rick