Newbie question

[Dave Foster]

Hello experts!

I have been searching for a way to automate a simple printing task which will save me a lot of time in my daily work. My job involves creating printed music, which is either 1 page (1up on A4 portrait) or 1+ pages (2up on A3 landscape). The process of setting the page setup and orientation on each file is a cumulatively long one, and I would like to be able to set everything to A4 portrait and have a little app process the file into the correct page size and orientation.

An exhaustive search of Google has yielded no decent results, especially as I want to do this without adding any other steps to the process eg. converting to PDF and manipulating in Acrobat.

I have read a lot of the documentation on this site, and it seems that this might be possible with a CUPS filter or backend. I am just struggling to find how to begin - what program to use to write it, how to reference the app, and where to put it. I am on Mac OSX 10.5.

A little research has led me to think that an easy way to begin would be to use some existing code - I have downloaded and installed the CUPS-PDF printer driver, and thought I could hijack and change the link in /etc/cups/printers.conf to run my app and send it to my default printer?

I have some mild programming experience, mainly in writing plugins for music notation software.

Any advice on how to get started, and maybe some links to some sample code I can tinker with, would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,

Dave