filePro Web Presents

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Rasmussen" <ras at anzio.com>
To: "tom heine" <tch at aljex.com>
Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: filePro Web Presents


> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, tom heine wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We can help you with this.   Howard Wolowitz, (inventor of filepro)
>> is one of the owners of our company, Aljex Software.  You can
>> query your filepro database, or even update the data (if you want)
>> from the web. We have sites with images included.  pretty much
>> anything you want can be done with filepro and the web.
>
> A brief look at your site reveals that it suffers from the limitations
> imposed on it by the web browser in regards to printing. Quite simply, a
> web browser is a lousy printing engine.

We don't print from the web browser. We do offer web browser as a display 
option in place of printing when it's more convenient, but if you want to 
print we use passthru print or email or pdf email or fax or csv file...

Only problem is that raster graphics don't survive through passthru, 
except...

I just this evening came up with something that obsoletes that statement and 
is pretty simple and ingenious and free,
but does still suffer the limitation that the server must produce final 
print data for the printer.
 ie: server generates pcl and user must have a pcl printer.
(or other printer the server knows how to generate data for, which, with 
ghostscript and a few other utils, does not have to be as constricting as it 
used to be, although for sanity sake, we do still just stick to pcl)
It does not require anything like an ssh tunnel or port forwarding in 
anyones router, nor yet another daemon running on the pc to watch a 
directory or poll a web server. All fancy formatting and raster graphics etc 
are unmolested.

It's more polished than this and several apparent gotcha's are not gotcha's 
at all and it's dead easy for the users, but the core mechanism is 
essentially:

generate a temp file in htdocs
winstart wget -O printpath http://server/tmp/file

where printpath can be;
LPT1
//computer/share

Who knew it could be that easy?

I haven't tried on a locally connected usb printer yet. One way I already 
know does work is to share it and point at your own share, but maybe the 
value found in the ports tab of print properties will work too.

> *WE* can help you with this. Our Web Print Object (WePO) would allow users
> to print reliably (not losing data off the right edge). It would also let
> you print fancier content - font changes, images, linedraw characters,
> overlays, etc. See examples at
>   http://www.anzio.com/products/wepo.htm

This looks pretty interesting.
I'm using wget as a "poor mans printing agent"
This looks like donald trumps printing agent.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro BBx  Linux SCO  Prosper/FACTS AutoCAD  #callahans Satriani