A script to print to distiller folders in 10.2

Mar 05, '03 08:20:00AM

Contributed by: Thomas Kaiser

If someone wants to print to watched folders from within MacOS X 10.2, e.g. for feeding a distiller running in the Classic environment, they might try this CUPS backend [2kb download] that I wrote just for this purpose.

If the $DISTILLER variable is set to TRUE, then the backend will search for watched folders and provides them as "printer devices" in PrintCenter. When printing into such a "device", the resulting PostScript file will be saved in the appropriate "In" folder. If a file with that name already exists, a numerical suffix will prepend overwriting that file.

Installation is straightforward. Just copy the script into /usr/libexec/cups/backend/ and adjust $DISTILLER, $TARGET_BASEDIR (the backend will search only inside this path for hotfolders) and $MAX_FILENAME_LENGTH (filenames will be truncated to this value -- use 30 in conjunction with distiller). After restarting the cupsd process (either by sending it a SIGHUP signal or rebooting), every distiller hotfolder will be available as separate "printer device", so you can print directly into the folder without manually clicking through "save as" dialogs.

Comments (12)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2003030215405857