pdf creation

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Jay R. Ashworth propounded (on Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 09:44:59AM -0500):
| On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 07:26:28AM -0600, Rod Caddy wrote:
| > I have seen all of the emails and am currently working on an easy 
| > solution to creating, printing, emailing, and faxing the pdf format from 
| > inside filepro.  At the risk of sounding stupid or at the very least 
| > ignorant, I do not quite understand why filepro will not print to many 
| > of the converters that are available on the market that set themselves 
| > up as a windows printer.  It will send the output to the ether and never 
| > be heard from.  I am sure that this has been discussed here before but I 
| > have been unable to find it and my grey matter seems to be getting 
| > grayer by the day.  Thanks for your response.
| 
| TTBOMK, Rod, that's not actually a problem; I'm reasonably certain that
| people are setting, for example, PrintWizard up on a Windows machine,
| exporting it with SMB, and pulling it into a *nix box to print to it.
| 
| By "reasonably certain", I mean "I'm pretty sure I've heard reports
| here that it works for people".  I just don't recall whom at the
| moment.
| 
| Now, on the other hand, there are many people for whom the idea of
| putting in a Windows machine in an otherwise all-Unix environment -- or
| even merely putting one on their critical path -- is roughly akin to
| cutting off their own head with a rusty machete.  I'm one of those.
| 
| We want a *native* solution.
| 
| I gather ghostpcl, as advocated by JPR and Brian White, will fill that
| need, though I won't have time to find out personally until sometime
| next week.  Thanks, Brian, for the pointer to your binaries page, BTW.

Brian says that ghostpcl 1.40, which I have, will properly handle the
ASCII line-drawing characters.  It doesn't for me.  OTOH, that ancient
Arnet 'faxjet' binary does so quite handily.

Some of my code:

     ::mf(14,unphone)=clnt(14) ' fax number from customer file:
     fax:mf ne "":gosub clrmsg;input ("22","28") xx "Fax This Invoice ? ":
     :fax and xx ne "Y":goto print:
     :fax:user num=getnum:
     :fax:tf=num; tf="/appl/tmp/fax"{tf:
     :fax:printer type "oj":
     :fax:printer "|faxjet -o"<tf; form "invoice":
     :fax:system noredraw ">/dev/null sendfax -m -n -d1"{mf<tf<";rm"<tf:
     :fax:printer reset:
     print:f ne "N":gosub clrmsg;input ("23","28") xx "Print This Invoice ? ":

'getnum' is in my PATH and gets me a unique temporary number:
	perl -e 'print(time,"$$\n");'

'oj' is my OfficeJet FP printcode table.

'sendfax' here is HylaFax's sendfax.   

-- 
JP