Printing Form Submission Data to a Networked Printer 1

[UnDoug]

Hi,

I have a webform that users will fill out, and upon clicking the submit button, I need the submission to be printed from our web server to a network printer so that it looks like the form that was filled out (same layout and formatting--it's mostly a form with checkboxes and text boxes).

The purpose of this is so that when a person wants to submit a print job electronically to our "digital print center" department where I work, they'll first fill out this form I've created online, and then send it directly to a printer in the digital print center, thus notifying the staff that a document is about to be queued to the huge printer machine (think Kinko's) they have there. The name of the queued document will be on the form that my script will pop out of their printer.

What is the best way to do this? Do I use the "lp" command from within the perl script? Do I need to have my script create a PDF? HTML page?

Someone suggested a javascript that would automatically bring up the printer dialog box so that the user can print directly to the printer.

Any thoughts?

 

[UnDoug]

This thread can be considered closed. I discovered the "html2ps" script for converting html to postscript, and can now have my script receive the form data, write it to an html file, run the html2ps script to create a postscript file, and then send the postscript file to the printer.

 

[PaulTEG]

Thanks for the find on html2ps, that's gonna be useful
--Paul

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