Print from RealPC via Printer Setup Utility

May 25, '04 09:41:00AM

Contributed by: jecwobble

I use RealPC for my limited Windows needs. Yes, it's slow, but it runs the few apps I need to my satisfaction. Anyway, printing with Insignia's solution never worked well for me (I don't remember why now), so I had set up an elaborate pipeline of a dummy PostScript printer, going through RedMon to GhostScript to produce PDFs that I saved on a "shared drive" folder on my iMac. I then opened the PDFs in Preview and printed them off. I always figured there was a way to cut out some of the steps, and after learning that Printer Setup Utility can process PostScript .PRN files, I finally tried using Folder Actions.

Using the dummy PostScript printer in RealPC, I check the "print to file" box. I navigate to a "shared drive" folder with the following AppleScript attached to it and save the resulting .PRN file.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
  tell application "Finder"
    repeat with aFile in added_items
      if the name of aFile contains {".prn"} then
        tell application "Printer Setup Utility"
          try
            open aFile
            on error err
            display dialog err
          end try
        end tell
      end if
    end repeat
  end tell
end adding folder items to
This script bypasses the RedMon/GhostScript/Preview steps and begins printing right away (and avoids an Excel printing problem that has plagued me from day one).

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040524002048586