Newbie question

[Dave Foster]

> Dave Foster wrote:
> > ...
> > 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.
>
> What you want to do is a PDF workflow - there are some examples on
> the Apple support site:
>
>
> http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&src=support_site.home&locale=en_US&q=pdf%20workflow
>
> This way you can just hit CMD+P and choose your workflow action to
> fiddle with the page and print it, or save it off to PDF (as you
> like).
>
> --
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Michael R Sweet                        Senior Printing System Engineer
>

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply. I have looked into your suggestion of using a workflow, but this is less than ideal because a) The process of choosing the workflow adds  an extra step to the process and b) I want to try and avoid doing the intermediate step of converting to PDF.

I have been studying the documentation on this site and in your book, and have tinkered with various bits of CUPS code - printing files from Terminal and generating an executable file which prints a file using XCode. I have also got as far as replacing the cups-pdf backend with my own code which runs (this gets me pretty close because I can batch print to it without any extra keystrokes or menus) - but I am stuck at how to pass the job data to it (or access it) to be able to achieve what I want to.

Any suggestions on how I can proceed, or if I'm barking up the wrong tree etc., would be much appreciated - or if you could point me in the direction of somewhere else I could enquire?

Many thanks,

Dave