AboutMahendra Singh Expertise I would like to answer questions related following:
1. IT Services such as Help desk, Hardware/Software/Programming for internet.
2. Business in Europe.
3. User/Demographic information.
4. Internet Programming languages such as ASP/PHP.
5. Servers : IIS, WebLogic.
6. Research based questions such as "What is the common use of internet in Europe and demographs"
Experience I answer questions on various European sites which are Business/Demographics and other issues related to EU.
Expert: Mahendra Singh Date: 4/8/2008 Subject: printing to a local printer from the web
Question I have recently asked the same question at the networking side and he told me to ask here, so I thought I would just copy and paste the questions.
Subject Local Printing of HTML pages
Question QUESTION: I am sure that you are not going to be asked a question like this very often. What I have is a Intranet setup and am currently running an internal website for our employees. It is important for them to be able to print out various pages. I was recently shown a way to print to these printers via ip address, very cool, but at any rate being able to control these printers via the webserver so that the various reports can be printed with proper formatting would be absolutely wonderful. Do you need more information?
ANSWER: Hi John,
You need to produce your reports in Adobe PDF File Format. ALL of the print attributes are always adhered to no matter what the printer or O/S. That is why you see PDF documents on all corporate sites. You can control every aspect of printing as well.
MOST of the software you are using to create the reports probably have PDF print capability. It is very simple to accomplish. PRINT the original document using the PDF printer from your software. It will be saved as a file with a PDF extension. Simply place the PDF file on your intranet and request that people print the PDF rather than the webpage.
If you use HTML it will appear differently for just about every person who accesses it. There is no printer control built into HTML.
In an intranet for business all docs should be PDF so that they cannot be altered.
Microsoft software also prints as a MICROSOFT IMAGE WRITER Doc which is very similar to the PDF. Although most people will avoid it as they don't know what it is. It will print correctly on any Microsoft O/S.
Adobe precluded Microsoft from using the PDF Writer function in all MS products when they released Vista. It is included free in many other non-MS software products.
If you need the full blown Adobe Acrobat software then you can purchase it from Adobe. I have had it for years and there is NO WAY to run a corporate website without it. You have complete control over how your PDF doc looks when printed, encryption, password security, etc... but only when using the full blown Adobe Acrobat Product. Someone in your organization probably already has a copy !!!
If you purchase the Adobe Acrobat then it will appear as a Printer on ALL of your software, MS and third party. You simply print to the PDF Printer and it magically creates a PDF file. It will also automatically open the Adobe Acrobat to view it so you can also encrypt it or change the way the clients will see the data.
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QUESTION: That is a great answer, and I will make the changes required for the static pages. A portion of what the intranet does are invoices. Creating PDFs on the fly is not practical. The invoice is submitted via HTML and I would like to format the invoice and then send it to the proper ipaddress for that store. Right now I am using an active X object called HTML printing to print the invoices but have found that the object can't control enough of the printer to make the printer reasonably fast. The object reverts the printer (dot matrix) to NLQ and is quite slow. On teh server I have several printers setup for the different locations and would like to be able to send the print job back to the printer that way.
I can see your dilemma. I am not much of an expert in dynamic printing from web pages. Whenever I needed something such as that I simply poked around and found some previously written PHP code and altered that to suit. The easy way out.
You might try and locate someone in the internet programming area on this site. There is probably an already written solution that will sove your problem. It may take a bit of searching and testing. I prefer editing someone's code to writing from scratch. Life's too short! Good luck.
Hope This Helps !!!!
Eddie Miller
eddie@SPUBOL.com
LANNSCOMM Corporation
