PJL to CUPS using PDF

Kev kevswindells at gmail.com
Fri Oct 23 07:49:27 PDT 2009


Hi Guys,

I have a DOS based application (who's code I can't change) which is currently printing documents in a variety of formats (PS, PJL, KPDL!) - Is it possible to set up a "virtual printer" which takes the output from one or more of those output formats and generates a PDF which can then be emailed*?

Currently this output is happily piped through RAW drivers to printers that support the appropriate language, and capturing the PDF virtual printer which uses the Mandriva supplied "Adobe Distiller" drivers seams to do the trick for plain text and PS.

Unfortunately PJL (my main concern) is rendered as text
- e.g. when viewing the PDF in a PDF viewer you see

%BeginFeature: *PageRegion A4
<</PageSize [595 842]>> setpagedevice
%EndFeature

Is there any way of getting this to render correctly - I have tried creating a second virtual printer and using known good drivers (e.g. a HP LaserJet 5M) and then piping the output to the virtual PDF printer with no luck.

* Having the file being written to a network share is perfectly fine - as we use Novell Netware all users appear as one user to the CUPS server anyway so it wouldn't know who to send the email to directly.




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