modify print job name

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Antonis Tsolomitis <atsol at aegean.gr> wrote (Friday 14 July 2006 09:18):

> Hi.
> 
> I am trying to setup a fax server using efax and CUPS. Everything is fine for linux clients and
> OpenOffice. However, I want Windows clients to be able to fax say from Word. The trouble is that no
> matter what we do Word adds "Microsoft Word - " to the job name and the extension ".doc". So if the fax
> number is, say, 1234567 and we save our file to 1234567, Word adds always the extension .doc and when it
> sents the file for faxing the job name is changed to "Microsoft Word - 1234567.doc" making faxing
> impossible.
> 
> Is there any easy way out? I have been googling for hours with no results.
> 
> One solution would be to have a virtual printer that instead of printing accepts the job, saves
> the file temporarily, strip the name from "Microsoft Word - 1234567.doc" to "1234567" and re-spool the
> file to the fax printer with lpr -Pfax -J  1234567
> 
> But how can I setup such a printer that instead of printing it runs a script?

Which distro are you using?

You've got various options:

  * write your own "backend" for that one printer (in Bash, Shell, 
    Python, Perl, Ruby, C,... whatever you like)

  * use one of the existing (third party) special backends that can
    act as wrappers for another script they run ("pipe" backend on 
    SUSE, "tea4cups" [see links on CUPS.org],...)

Cheers,
Kurt