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Making Linux look like an HP JetDirect Card

Short - I want to make a printer share on a linux box Fedora2 (i'm willing to use diffrent os) work like an HP JetDirect card does. In other words I want to windows client to send print jobs to an IP address. I think HP JetDirect cards use port 9100

Long story: My corp accounting dept sends print jobs to my office printer using the HP's JetDIrect cards IP address. We have many jobs that are 500+ pages that just get filled away. I would like to take these print jobs and just save them to a pdf file. I've played and setup a linux box to take a postscript file and convert it to pdf. The box sending the print jobs I think is a SCO unix box, but getting changes to that box is not an option.

Short Summery: Take a TCP/IP print job ment for a HPLaserJet JetDIrect card and convert it to a pdf and drop it off in a share.

So guys/gals can this be done?

Karl Heinz Kremer

This could be done with a Perl script that starts a server process to listen on port 9100, and then stores every print job received to a file. Once the file is completely written, the server process would then call the Ghostscript to convert the PostScript file to PDF (either directly, or via the ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript). You would not be able to give the PDF files any meaningful names. You could try to extract the document name from the DSC header of the PostScript file, but depending on the application that produced the PostScript, you may not find anything useful in the header.

Are you sure that all files that are sent to the printer are PostScript?

One other thing to keep in mind: There are actually two flavours of the JetDirect protocol: One only sends data on port 9100, in the newer one, the printer sends data back to the PC on port 9101. If you can use the first method, the Perl script will work.

How are your Perl skills?

shook81

ASKER

Perl skills = nota I forgot to add i'm pretty new to linux and trying to learn more about the OS. It sounds like this would be a lot harder then what I had guessed.

Karl Heinz Kremer

Let me see if I can come up with something. I need some time for this however.

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Karl Heinz Kremer

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Karl Heinz Kremer

Any luck?

shook81

ASKER

sorry for the delay. Some things have come up at the office and I'm having to put this idea on the back burner for now.