Automated PDF Creation

[philjones2000]

Hi Everyone

 

The school's newsletter is done by the office in pdf format. So every week I grab the pub file from their area, open and print it with cutepdf and upload to the website.

 

Trouble is I'm rubbish and forget. And those are the weeks the Head checks (how does she know!).

 

Is there a way to automate this? If there was a command line pub-pdf converter I could set up a scheduled task or a cron job easily enough I think but I have not been able to find one.

 

Thanks as always

 

Phil

[Geoff]

I have a PDF printer setup and shared on our (Linux) print server. That way anyone can create PDF files for themselves. Instructions for Linux/Cups/Samba are on the wiki.

[OutToLunch]

Can't you use the /p command line option with Publisher to print the file to PDF automatically? You might need to look around for a PDF printer which doesn't present you with any dialogue boxes mind...

[alan-d]

Show the Office how to do it

[plexer]

Get them to print it to a pdf to a shared area then automate the uploading of that to the website?

 

Ben

[dhicks]

Can't you use the /p command line option with Publisher to print the file to PDF automatically? You might need to look around for a PDF printer which doesn't present you with any dialogue boxes mind...

 

The open source PDF Creator can be set to print with no dialog boxes (it's what our entire print system is based on here). If that /p option doesn't work, try a short AutoIt script to automate Publisher loading up, printing and quitting.

 

--

David Hicks

[gibbo_ap]

our site is hosted in the school, i have the admin staff do their thing then save it in a share called PDFs this is a folder on the site, as long as the news letter has the same name bobs ure uncle

 

also have a nifty bit of asp running all over the site which reads whats in a folder and displays this on teh page as links

[philjones2000]

Thanks everyone.

 

I don't want to have to get the office staff to do it because I know they will forget and then it will make me look bad!

 

PDF creator looks great and I have used the mspub.exe /p switch to print it from a batch that also copies and renames the file as I want.

 

Now we'll see what happens when the new one comes out...

 

Thanks again