[cups.general] Call a GUI application from cups filter while printing

[Jerome Alet]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 02:46:08PM -0800, Debashis wrote:
> I am trying to pop up a dialog window where the user can enter a 
> passcode to validate his job for Job accounting purposes on Ubuntu 
> Linux OS. 
> I know that cups calls your filter if you specify the name in the 
> PPD file, but will it be possible to call a GUI application (For 
> example: created using QT) from the filter, accept the users input 
> and then continue with the printing by writing the data to the 
> stdout. 

This is perfectly possible. You can do this either with PyKotIcon 
(http://www.pykota.com) which is a standalone generic networked 
dialogs manager and runs on client hosts (or localhost), and 
pknotify which is a generic XML-RPC client which can talk to 
PyKotIcon as part of PyKota's accounting backend. To my knowledge
only the pknotify client exist, but you could probably use it even
if you don't use the other parts of PyKota, or write your own
using similar techniques. 

PyKotIcon is completely unrelated to PyKota or print accounting : 
you can use it to ask whatever you want to the end user (birthdate, 
whether he likes a particular movie, etc...). It just sits there 
waiting for a print server (PyKotIcon is a server application 
running on print clients) to send an input dialog message, 
informational message, or confirmation dialog message, and returns 
textual results. 

I believe PrintAgent / PrintingWorks is another similar solution, 
although I've not used it yet (http://www.lucidsystems.org) 

bye

Jerome Alet