Printing in a browser-fronted environment

[Ken Cole]

Bob,

We use options 1, 2 and 3.

Your proposal certainly has merits.

I agree with Brian on setting content type. We do the same regularly.

Ken

On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 at 07:15, Brian K. White via Filepro-list <
filepro-list at lists.celestial.com> wrote:

> Content-type may be set a couple different ways.
>
> If the file is being served by a cgi, the a cgi may write whatever kind
> of http headers it wants, including content-type.
>
> If the file is being served by the web server directly, then you can
> define new custom content types in the mime-types file, or by special
> httpd.conf directives, (which probably means .htaccess directives can do
> it also)
>
> But for the sake of simplicity I'll show the two most common/basic ways
> to get a mime-type set
>
> A) cgi. In place of a plain url to a file, you have a url to a cgi
> script that squirts a file at the client.
>
> The cgi might look like this:
> ...cgi-bin/login.vnc:
> ---
> #!/bin/ksh
> printf "Content-Type: VncViewer/Config\n\n"
> # [...]
> cat ${TEMPLATE}.vnc
> printf "host=%s\r\n" $HOST
> printf "port=%s\r\n" $PORT
> ---
>
> The only http header in this case is "Content-Type: VncViewer/Config".
> http header is nothing more than whatever lines are first emitted by the
> script (any script, any number of lines) until the first empty line.
> Everything after the first empty line is the content. So the 2nd "\n" on
> the printf makes the empty line which ends the headers and starts the
> content.
>
>
> B) mime-types. Alternatively, the web server can be told to recognize
> files by their filename extensions, and send a specified content-type
> matched to a file extension. They are defined in mime-types, which might
> appear in a few different common places on the server depending on the
> servers apache config. (Other web servers like nginx will have some
> equivalent but I don't know their details)
>
> So for instance on my opensuse boxes, the file is in /etc/mime-types,
> and I have these lines added to the end:
> VncViewer/Config vnc
> application/facetwin fwt
> application/mstsc rdp
> application/vnd.aljex.at at
>
> There is VncViewer/Config again. If I had a static foo.vnc file sitting
> on the server and had a url to it, there is no cgi shell script to write
> headers. The web server itself generates a few http headers for the
> response when it sends the requested file, and this tells the web server
> to use VncViewer/Config instead of text/plain or
> application/octet-stream for any *.vnc files.
>
> C) I'm pretty sure there are yet other ways you could define the
> behavior you want even more specially by httpd.conf and .htaccess rules,
> but I just don't happen to know those details off hand.
>
> The CLIENT OS can also recognize a file by it's extension even if the
> web server doesn't send the right content-type, but that is unreliable.
> That is why you sometimes get .csv files that show up as text in the
> browser instead of downloaded and opened by your default spreadsheet
> app, or sometimes for example it works in IE but not in Firefox, for the
> same file from the same server to the same client.
>
> --
> bkw
>
>
> On 3/31/2017 1:24 PM, Bob Rasmussen via Filepro-list wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Mar 2017, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> >
> >> Is it possible to have a new "Content-Type", such as
> >> "application/X-PrintWizard", which could be returned as the result of
> >> a "normal" HTTP link?
> >
> > I don't know. I believe the content-type is determined by the web
> > server, but I don't know how it does so. Do you know this?
> >
> >
> >
> > 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
> >  street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
> >                  10240 SW Nimbus, Suite L9
> >                  Portland, OR  97223  USA
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