Network PDF Printer

[ICTNUT]

Hi Guys,

 

I am looking for a way to provide students and staff the ability to "print" PDF documents.

 

I thought possibly having something installed on the print server (Server 2003 R2) and sharing this out via our printer script.

 

Does anyone do anything like this???

[mrforgetful]

Everytime I've tried the free PDF printers it's been a nightmare. I once had one set up that worked with no problems but then we upgraded our servers and I never got it working again.

 

Most others have rendering issues, especially around pictures in Publisher etc. Thankfully with the death if dIDA the need has diminished greatly.

 

Even Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 wouldn't render certain documents correctly.

 

To be honest the best way I've ever found with no problems at all is...using Microsoft Office 2007.

[Geoff]

Yes, I do this. The print server is a Linux box using Samba + Cups. I installed the cups-pdf package which sets up the printer queue for me in Cups. I then had to customise /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf and change the following settings:

#label file names with unique jobid to avoid overwriting jobs with the same filename
Label 1
#Disable anonymous use
AnonUser
#set umask
UserUMask 0077

 

Then samba needs to be told about the new printer and windows drivers need to be loaded.

 

/etc/init.d/samba reload
cupsaddsmb -v -H hermes -U 'hermes\root' PDF

 

At which point you can add it to your printer scripts and you are able to print to the pdf printer. However there's no way to access the PDF files it produces yet, so we need to make a new share in samba for that. I did mine like this:

 

[pdfs]
  comment = PDF files
  path = /var/spool/cups-pdf/out
  browsable = yes
  read only = yes
  hide unreadable = yes
  guest ok = no

 

Users can now access this share however they like. I'd suggest either a drive mapping or a shortcut on their desktop. Personally, I map the P: drive in the login scripts.

 

Also note, because of the umask we set in cups-pdf.conf and the 'hide unreadable' setting being enabled here, users will only see their own pdf prints. eg.

 

root@hermes:/var/spool/cups-pdf/out# ls -l
total 56
-rw------- 1 mmilne      domain users 36334 2008-03-05 08:14 job_10031-tmp7.pdf
-rw------- 1 dstephenson domain users 17119 2008-03-05 09:15 job_10055-Microsoft_Word_-_Dulce_et_decorum_est.pdf

 

The final thing you need to do, is clean things up on a regular basis to stop your print servers disk becoming full of useless pdf files. I do this nightly in a cronjob

 

0 0 * * * rm /var/spool/cups-pdf/out/*.pdf

 

you might want to run rm verbosely (with the -v option) for the first few nights to check it's working ok. Also tell your users when and how often you clean up.

Edited March 5, 2008 by Geoff

[ICT_GUY]

Sorry not a network version but ,Primo PDF

 

http://www.primopdf.com/

 

I have it installed on each PC, it sits there as another printer and it works flawlessly. Really, its one of the best bits of free software I have ever found.

[Diello]

What we're about to do...

 

http://maximillianx.blogspot.com/2008/02/network-admin-tip-create-shared-pdf.html

[ICTNUT]

@Geoff: I am slowly moving things over to *nix as much as I can and a central print server would do the trick great, I will surely look into this.

 

Evryone else many thanks for your pointers.

[Ric_]

@ICTNUT: Check out http://edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/HOWTOs for wiki artciles about setting up the print server. I finished migrating mine yesterday and double-checked the instructions as I did it so you should have no problems.

[altecsole]

We use YAFPC - http://www.yafpc.net/

 

We installed it on some old hardware, put it on our network, and then added it to our server and shared it. When you send a print to it it sends you back an email with your page as a pdf attachment.

 

The license cost us about £30. It's been updated since the version we use. It's been running in a cupboard for about a year now and no problems at all.

[MkII]

I trialled a few and settled on PDFCreator - nice and simple, no nag screens etc, installed across whole network.

 

Local Authority also use it to send prints to central printing service.

[Guest Guest]

CutePDF

 

Easy and quick. No banners, ads, nags, or watermarks

[cooper]

I use PDF995

 

http://www.pdf995.com/

 

Guide on the site to make it a network printer.

 

I have this scripted to run for all admin staff so they can convert Newsletters ect to send out via parentmail

[elsiegee40]

I use pdf995 too and find it very good.

 

My only niggle is that I havn't worked out how (if?) to make it produce non A4 size output

[plock]

The latest version of PDFCreator can be installed on a print server and then shared like a normal networked printer. Sounds like exactly what you're after.

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

[boomam]

I trialled a few and settled on PDFCreator - nice and simple, no nag screens etc, installed across whole network.

Same here.

We have it on our station builds, and going out via a GPO as its in MSI format. .

[Oops_my_bad]

The latest version of PDFCreator can be installed on a print server and then shared like a normal networked printer. Sounds like exactly what you're after.

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

 

This is a really nice solution - I have it running for students but am prevented setting it up for staff because staff+student home dirs reside on different volumes. Is there a way to make this program save the .pdf to any users homedir rather than hardcoded like \\server\users\students? Consolidating home directories is not really a viable option

[plexer]

This is where sharing each users home folder would help out if they are on the same server so \\server\username$ would take you to the correct place but if you have more than one server it won't work.

 

Ben

[ChrisH]

This is a really nice solution - I have it running for students but am prevented setting it up for staff because staff+student home dirs reside on different volumes. Is there a way to make this program save the .pdf to any users homedir rather than hardcoded like \\server\users\students? Consolidating home directories is not really a viable option

 

Can you not map the same drive letter to student and staff. Doesnt matter that they are in different locations.

[Oops_my_bad]

Can you not map the same drive letter to student and staff. Doesnt matter that they are in different locations.

 

Yes, yes - all users home drives are mapped with the same letter, is it possible to get pdfcreator to save it that way?

[ChrisH]

I had a look and it looks like it querying the shell folders entry in the registry so I assume if your my docs are redirected properly etc it should go straight to their home dir.

[Oops_my_bad]

OK, mydocs are redirected for the student home dirs, but not for staff - I've tried it with the variable, but just kicks up an error. It wont work by specifying P:\PDF's because it's expecting the P: drive to be mapped on the server and not the client if you know what I mean :/

[Geoff]

On Linux you can also fudge it with UnionFS. I need to do that here for some situations (web server related).

 

Consider the following:

 

I have two windows file servers. One holding the staff my docs, other holding the pupils my docs. They have shares for each top level folder, rather than individual user shares. eg.

 

\\server1\pupils\

\\server2\staff\

 

Assuming I'm using autofs on my linux box to mount the above shares. I'll have the following directories present on my system:

 

/smb/pupils

/smb/staff

 

Now all I need to do is glue them together with unionfs:

 

mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/smb/server1/pupils:/smb/server2/staff none /home/

 

(I've used /home/ so the mount point is compatible with where Linux expects users home directories to be. This means, for example, you can export this over NFS and have a room full of Linux desktop PCs...).

 

You can then alter the cups-pdf printer driver to output to /home/$USER$ and it'll write files to the users my docs.

[Oops_my_bad]

On Linux you can also fudge it with UnionFS

Now that's just showing off

[Geoff]

No, I've entirely fixed the problem you had. All you need to do now is to implement it. Edited March 14, 2008 by Geoff