[ale] /dev/pdf

[Jim Philips]

It sounds great. Have you considered submitting it to a larger project, like 
KDE or CUPS?

On Saturday 31 May 2003 12:18 am, Marvin Dickens wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 18:43, Jim Philips wrote:
> > Maybe you have done it a little differently, but KDE already comes with
> > this feature.
>
> It has a bare minimum of error control and further only spits out pdf
> format version 1.2 (Acrobat 3) due to it's exclusive reliance on ps2pdf
> as the engine that generates output. In addition, there is no way to
> hand that backend arguements that other versions of ps2pdf (Namely
> ps2pdf12 and ps2pdf13) take to address other compatibility issues.
> Further, this backend is shell script (No a bad thing, but not a great
> thing either). The backend I am writing for the customer is written in
> perl (Cross platform usable within their corporation...) and uses
> pdf::create to ensure extensibility and maintainability.
>
>
> In short: the script shipped with kde functional, but not robust. That
> is not to say it does not fill the needs of most uses: It does. However,
> my client wants robust. Here is a copy of the script you are talking
> about. I shamelessly admit to having studied it (Plus some other stuff
> too). Considering what it does within the shell, it's amazingly short in
> line count. Michael Goffioul, who wrote it is obviously very
> accomplished at scripting:
>
> #!/bin/sh
> # Copyright (C) Michael Goffioul (goffioul at imec.be) 2001
> LOGFILE=/tmp/pdf.log
> PDFBIN=`which ps2pdf`
> FILENAME=
> # this is borrowed from printpdf script for the filename
> PRINTTIME=`date +%b%d-%H%M%S`
>
> echo "Executable: $PDFBIN" > $LOGFILE
> echo "Arguments: |$1|$2|$3|$4|$5|$6|" >> $LOGFILE
> echo $# $PRINTTIME >> $LOGFILE
>
> # case of no argument, prints available URIs
> if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
> 	if [ ! -x "$PDFBIN" ]; then
> 		exit 0
> 	fi
> 	echo "direct pdf \"Unknown\" \"PDF Writing\""
> 	exit 0
> fi
>
> # case of wrong number of arguments
> if [ $# -ne 5 -a $# -ne 6 ]; then
> 	echo "Usage: pdf job-id user title copies options [file]"
> 	exit 1
> fi
>
> # get PDF directory from device URI, and check write status
> PDFDIR=${DEVICE_URI#pdf:}
> if [ ! -d "$PDFDIR" -o ! -w "$PDFDIR" ]; then
> 	echo "ERROR: directory $PDFDIR not writable"
> 	exit 1
> fi
>
> echo "PDF directory: $PDFDIR" >> $LOGFILE
>
> # generate output filename
> OUTPUTFILENAME=
> if [ "$3" = "" ]; then
> 	OUTPUTFILENAME="$PDFDIR/unknown.pdf"
> else
> 	# OUTPUTFILENAME="$PDFDIR/${3//[^[:alnum:]]/_}.pdf"
> 	# I changed this to user name, and the printtime to track down who
> 	# printed the PDF and when, samba printing just uses nobody
>
> 	OUTPUTFILENAME="$PDFDIR/$2-$PRINTTIME.pdf"
> 	echo "PDF file: $OUTPUTFILENAME placed in: $PDFDIR" >> $LOGFILE
> fi
>
> echo "Output file name: $OUTPUTFILENAME" >> $LOGFILE
>
> # run ghostscript
> if [ $# -eq 6 ]; then
> 	$PDFBIN $6 "$OUTPUTFILENAME"
> #>& /dev/null
> else
> 	$PDFBIN - "$OUTPUTFILENAME" >& /dev/null
> fi
>
> # modify ownership and permissions on the file
> #  - world readable
> #  - owns to user specified in argument
> chmod a+r "$OUTPUTFILENAME"
> if [ "$2" != "" ]; then
> 	chown $2 "$OUTPUTFILENAME"
> fi
>
> exit 0
>
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