Use PDF Services to print to PrintFu's printing service

Mar 07, '05 01:15:00PM

Contributed by: Anonymous

PrintFu is a pretty cool service that takes your large documents and, in a couple days, delivers a nicely packaged "book." I did a 244 page business plan using the service, and it cost around US $7.00. Since I read about four business plans a week, I decided to write a script to automatically print to PrintFu. Thanks to the MacNN forums for the basis of the following AppleScript).

OS X 10.2.4 and newer has a thing called PDF Services (assorted hints on PDF Services) built in. It basically allows you to take a document, turn it into a PDF, and throw it to an AppleScript, Unix script, application etc. So save the following AppleScript as "Send to PrintFu" and place it in your user's Library/PDF Services folder (create it if necessary). The next time you print anything, you will see a new drop down-button on the Print dialog box. Click it, and select "Send to PrintFu" from that drop-down. Boom, you're done.

Read the rest of the hint for the script...

on open these_items
  
  tell me to activate
  set question to "Ready to send this file to PrintFu?"
  
  display dialog question buttons {"Yes", "Cancel"} default button 1
  set userChoice to button returned of result
  if userChoice is not "Cancel" then
    repeat with aFile in these_items
      set pdfLocation to POSIX path of aFile
      set thisurl to do shell script ¬
        "curl -F \"fileUpload=@" & pdfLocation ¬
        & "\" -F \"mcAction=processRemoteFileUpload\" http://www.printfu.org/index.cfm"
      open location thisurl
    end repeat
  end if
end open

[robg adds: Sorry for the div section above, but it seemed the best way to show this without breaking it -- the long do shell script line can't be broken any more than I have done so. Just click in the scrolling box region, select all, hit copy, then paste in Script Editor.

I'd never heard of PrintFu before, so I gave it a big test -- I uploaded the Motion manual, which is 843 pages long! After waiting (quite a while) for the large PDF to upload, I got a cost back -- $25.66, including shipping. For sake of comparison, I then tried FedEx/Kinko's. First I tried their online upload tool, and after waiting again for the lengthy upload, I was told the document was too large and I'd have to call! You'd think they could check the document size first, to save the wasted upload. So I called, and got a quote of $54.86 -- over twice as expensive. Both places will print double-sided and three-hole-punched. So I'm going to try a test print with PrintFu; if I have any negative experiences, I'll update this article (it still irks me that Motion doesn't include a printed manual; you just get a printed "Guided Tour," and the PDF of the big book). Note that PrintFu is a USA-only solution at this point.

As a side note, the developer of PrintFu did all the work on a PowerBook G4, as noted in his blog...]

Comments (6)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050215062628210