I am currently developing a program that allows a user to take a group of files from our windows network, creates postscript files, places them in an outgoing folder and replaces them with pdfs.

At them moment I have a script that trawls through a set of defined folders and converts any files found.

What I would prefer to do, is have the Delphi program on the windows client call a script on the Linux server, that converts the files in the passed folder.

I can write the script OK, but am having problems working out whether I can call the script from within Delphi and wait for it to finish

Any experience?

Dan

You can setup a printer via samba that will create PDF files. You just setup a network postscript printer on the windows PC that connects to the samba printer on the linux side.

Mandrake's default samba configuration file includes an example but the problem is that the name of the PDF file is random. I haven't taken the time to figure out how to change this.

Besides, I don't know of a way to execute a linux script from windows unless its a client / server app.

Instead of trawling it might be best to have a single input folder and then a conversion output folder. Use a cron job that checks the folder every minute, converts and saves to the output folder and then deletes the input file.

My company has a nifty PDF conversion server that is a Sun Sparc workstation. It can use email, ftp or a web browser interface to send PS and receive PDF files. It uses ghostscript but I don't think I could get all of the scripts etc to build one for myself.

Thanks for the hint

Unfortunately the PDFprinters that I can find for Linux don't have the functionality I need.

When we create a pdf batch, these are filed in dated outgoing folders, for the relevent client - which helps in backup/retrieval as well as auditing from out end.

At the moment each user creates the output in a User folder and manually moves the pdfs to the out folder. We want to automate the process to treat larger batches. However we would like to avoid scanning all the possible folders to find new postscript output.

Either we need a pdf printer where the user can define the destination, or script that can be called on a specific destination from another program.

Dan

When your talking about PDF printers do you mean ghostscript and ps2pdf?

What kind of functionality do you need and what are you using to create the PDFs?

Another posibility would be a webpage application similar to webcdwriter. You could upload a file, convert and the pop up a page where they could download the converted files.