Howdy Anyone know of the best way to batch FOP generated PDF documents for printing. In our scenario documents are queued for generation, followed by printing, using threads.
We print from both a Windows 2000 GUI application and Unix server, by spawning a shell command through Runtime.exec. The commands we use are along the lines of (I'm not at work Win/Dos: "c:/Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 5.0/Reader/AcroRd32.exe " + "/t " + file + " " + printerName + " " + driverName + " " + portName Unix: cat blah.pdf | acroread -toPostScript | lpr The trouble we are having is tracking the print job and knowing when to kill it. In the Dos version we can't get no exit status. In fact we currently count to 10 then kill the process. I think using Acrobat Reader to launch a print job is loony tunes, but am struggling to find a better way. Does anyone know of a better way, either to better control the shell command, or to fire PDF at a printer from Java. Also seeing some corruptiion of the margins in the Unix case. Any Unix gurus know if lpr or acroread need some flags to shrink the margin or set the page size. So many variables... Prob this is all slightly off topic. Not sure. Seems printing is a reasonable thing to do with a PDF so maybe we have all floundered a bit in this area. WPE When not Fopping, can be found floundering with style.
