Best way to implement printing forms (invoices, etc)?

Helge Blischke h.blischke at acm.org
Thu Nov 10 00:58:30 PST 2011


Joe Greco wrote:

> So we recently retired a big beast of a laser printer (HP 5Si) and
> replaced it with several smaller CP2025 color lasers.  One of the
> downsides is the loss of trays for preprinted forms (invoices, etc),
> however, since these are color printers, they do print very reasonable
> approximations of the form stock we were using.
> 
> We're not currently a CUPS shop, but I've been meaning to switch for,
> well, awhile now.
> 
> Under Berkeley lpd, I know how I'd go about this: make a separate lpd
> queue for invoice printing, run that into Ghostscript, get a bitmap, use
> netpbm to merge it with the desired form's bitmap, make that back into a
> monster PostScript nightmare, and shoot it at the printer.  It's not
> elegant, but it works, we've done things like that in the past.
> 
> I'm wondering if there's something more elegant possible with CUPS.  I've
> been looking at the documentation but it isn't quite clear how best to
> tackle something like this...  any comments appreciated.

You could use the "alternate pstops filter" (see the links on the CUPS web 
site). The filter published there is based on the 1.1.19 original; if you 
drop me an e-mail, I could send you a more recent source based on 1.3.5.
This filter (use any 1.3.x sources to compile) can easily be used on 1.4.x 
(1.5.0 not tested).
When using that filter, you can apply the preprinted forms as a watermark to 
the pages with a little bit of PostScript programming.

Helge





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