cups print job and save PDF copy

joanakin · 01-15-2014, 09:14 PM

Greetings
I want cups to print job at same time save a PDF copy. I have installed cups and can print to physical printer I have as well setup cups-pdf and I can print to it to generate the PDF under user directory's. the challenge is I want a script to trigger cups-pdf to save pdf under users directory each time I print to physical printer. pls help

John VV · 01-16-2014, 12:43 AM

if you need to do this in the terminal
then wright a print launcher script to make a shadow copy

but if you already have a pdf open in Ockluar then why not just "save copy as "

allend · 01-16-2014, 02:30 AM

Quote:

the challenge is I want a script to trigger cups-pdf to save pdf under users directory each time I print to physical printer. pls help

There is some information here about a script to move a .pdf file to a user's directory. Should not be hard to add an output to the physical printer.http://slackwiki.com/PDF_Printing

joanakin · 01-16-2014, 04:47 AM

Thank you for the reply. Let me be more explicit. The cups-pdf works perfectly when printed on it (stand-alone). the physical printer works well too(stand-alone).

What i want to achieve is to print to physical printer(on paper) and at the same time automatically generate pdf of the job printed.

jdkaye · 01-16-2014, 05:16 AM

I'm not sure I understand what you want. What is the file type of the original document that you want to print? Usually the application that created it will have a print menu with a "print to file" option. But again I'm not really sure what you want to do exactly.
jdk

joanakin · 01-16-2014, 05:41 AM

i have setup printer from cups and share it with samba.

the printers are as follows

Printer1
Printer2
Cups-PDF-Printer

samba users will print to Printer1 or Printer2 for paper works. I want to monitor the content of the printed jobs so I need to make Cups-PDF-Printer to automatically save/print copy of the job send to Printer1 or Printer2 as pdf.

michaelk · 01-16-2014, 06:38 AM

You can create a simple script along with a special samba printer share to print both to a physical and the cups-pdf printer.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-added-756040/

joanakin · 01-16-2014, 08:14 AM

@michaelk that was a good link. However the script place the print request on Cups-PDF printer before printing the job.

In my case I needed the Printer to print the job first and then create PDF. reason being that i have two or more printers with group permission. So i need that script to work in reverse order. pls help.

allend · 01-16-2014, 09:26 AM

You can set up a multiplex printing queue. e.g. http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/dual_print.html

michaelk · 01-16-2014, 09:29 AM

This would be the printer1 print command script. I would guess that additional steps are required to save the pdf file in a specific directory.

Quote:

#!/bin/sh
# prints to physical printer
lpr -P printer1 $1

# prints to cups-pdf
lpr -P cups-pdf $1

#Delete spooled file, change path as necessary
rm /var/spool/samba/$1

joanakin · 01-16-2014, 10:50 AM

@michaelk thank you once more. I must really be doing something wrong. when i run the script from shell and try printing it didn't work rather it gave rm: cannot remove `/var/spool/samba/': Is a directory. Pls guide me where to run the scrip.

michaelk · 01-16-2014, 11:09 AM

The $1 is a command line argument. When windows prints a document to samba it saves it in the /var/spool/samba/ directory, then passes the name of the spooled file as a command line argument to your print script. If you are not running the script without an argument like

myscript testfile

then you you should see this error. This spooled file is not automatically deleted which is why I added the line to delete. While you are testing your script I suggest commenting the line with a # so it is not executed.