My department runs a fairly large network of Unix machines with two "industrial" public printers. I often work there on my PowerBook, connected to the network via a public port. When I needed to print something, I used to save it as a PDF, ftp or scp it to my Unix account, then log in via
ssh, use
pdf2ps, and finally print the document using
lpr. Having read about
PDF Workflow here on oxshints, I decided to streamline this process a little. I now have a "Print in DCS" (Department of Computer Science) button in every Print dialogue.
First, I placed
this shell script in ~/Library/PDF Services. Remember to replace
username@server in the two places it appears. The string
Server in the third dialogue was originally the name of my server; you can put the name of yours there if you want.
You will also need to have exchanged SSH keys with the server, so that you can log in without a password. I suggest that anyone who uses SSH regularly should do this as it makes life so much easier. See the SSH documentation for details. Finally, the script above sends the PDF directly to the printers. I discovered that they are able to handle this natively. If yours can't, you will need to add
pdf2ps to the chain.
In case you were wondering, I can't use any of the various remote printing technologies because only Department machines can use those printers. This is entirely sensible as they operate a "printer credits" system they wouldn't want people bypassing.