filePro Web Presents

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Brian K. White wrote:

> ...
> 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...

Raster graphics survive fine in passthru print in Anzio, as far as I
know...

>
> 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

I looked up "wget", which turns out to be a GNU utility to fetch data from
an HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP server
(http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html). Your approach then does file
output to "LPT1" or "//computer/share" or whatever, which is the
equivalent of Anzio's "Print level = raw".

If this approach works for you, great. I would just point out a few
things:

1. This will not work with USB-connected printers (although it might work
using the share name).

2. It will not work with Windows-only (a.k.a. brain-dead) printers.

3. You still must produce either plaintext or the proper escape-code
language for the printer being used.

4. If your telnet client is AnzioWin, there is an equivalent to wget built
in. You can fetch and print a file with the command (issued by the host,
or a macro triggered by a keystroke):
   PRINTFILE http://server/tmp/file
or similar for HTTPS or FTP. There are also options for passing
username/password information. Now the data can be a) plaintext sent
directly to the printer; b) plaintext which is auto-fit to the printer by
the built-in Print Wizard; c) esc-coded text which is sent directly to the
printer; d) PCL codes that are translated, and sent to any printer; or e)
Print Wizard Markup Language, which can be generated by using our Printwiz
printer definition file for filePro.

5. The MAIN point, though, is that if you web-enable an application, the
user may have only IE on their desktop, and you may not know what kind of
printer they have. Yet you still need to send (nice-looking) printouts to
the user's printer. That is tough! WePO can do all that.

6. If you do want to go the route of generating PDFs on the server, we can
help with that too. We have in beta a Linux version of Print Wizard. It
works like this:
   filePro printcodes -> printwiz.prt -> PWML data -> printwiz -> PDF
This is NOT just a way to produce plaintext ("greenbar") reports. This has
a great range of capabilities.

I hope that this doesn't just muddy the waters.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com