[cups.general] Print to a Postscript File instead of Physical Printer

Johannes Meixner jsmeix at suse.de
Tue Jun 29 03:44:03 PDT 2010


Hello,

On Jun 28 13:23 David Moore wrote (shortened):
> Is there a way to configure CUPS to output print jobs
> submitted to it to a PostScript file.

The basic idea behind is to write a selfmade CUPS backend
(see "man 7 filter" and "man 7 backend") and use a PPD file
for a generic PostScript printer to set up a print queue
which results generic PostScript which is written by
the backend to a file where the file name could be specified
as command line option e.g. "lp ... -o filename=MyFile ..."
(available via argv[5]) or as fallback the file name is
generated from job-number (argv[1]) and user-name (argv[2]).

You may have a look at
http://www.cups-pdf.de/
in particular
http://www.cups-pdf.de/cups-pdf-CURRENT/README
regarding the general idea behind how to do it.

If you use cups-pdf, you may change in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf
the "GSCall" so that Ghostscript produces PostScript
instead of PDF.


> Can I configure this to happen by default?

Set up the default print queue with it.


> Is there a way to set the name of the output file?

Yes, but depending on how your users like to set the name
(manually set command line option versus graphical dialogs)
it can become tricky up to impossible (e.g. let the user
enter an arbitrary name via the existing usual printing
dialogs).


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
-- 
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany
AG Nuernberg, HRB 16746, GF: Markus Rex





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