Hi, Printing (on any platform) to a printer basically consists of 2 steps.
1) generate PDL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Page_description_language) On Windows for example this could be done by a printerdriver that translates GDI calls into postscript. The important thing to note here is that the printerdriver knows how to deal with finishing options (like stapling, booklet, trimming). If you generate PDL data without the 'official' printerdriver then a customer might not be able to use these finishing options. If finishing options is not relevant to you then you might be able to use a generic printerdriver (i.e. PDFCreator is a generic printerdriver on Windows that generates PDF files). Note that on Windows there are generic printer drivers available that can be customized by printer manufacturers (i.e. this does the heavy lifting from GDI to postscript or pcl). For more information on that, see also: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff560843(v=vs.85) 2) transfer PDL data to printer This highly depends on the printer type, but typical transport 'mechanisms' are LPR/LPD, Socket Printing, USB and (ofcourse) LPT. The OS has support for these transport mechanisms (on Windows this is called 'printer port' and there is a "Standard TCP/IP Port" available that can print to network based printers). So looking at all this, I have a couple of questions: 1) Are the jobs that you receive already in "PDL" format? 2) How is the attached printer actually attached? (i.e. network based or USB) 3) (as already mentioned somewhere else in this thread) Have you looked at CUPS? Best regards, Jeroen Janssen On May 18, 5:51 am, Tauren Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd like to build a print server that receives jobs over the network and > can print them to an attached printer. We were thinking about utilizing > websockets to notify the print server that a job is ready, so node came to > mind. But it doesn't seem like node is the right tool for interfacing with > a printer. If anyone has ideas on how to do this, I'd love to hear them. > > I've been looking at projects such as node-qt and node-gui, but they don't > seem to support any printing features yet. > > Although we prefer to use linux or OSX for everything, these print servers > would be installed onsite at client locations. Besides the specific > printers we need to print to only have Windows drivers at this time, so we > will definitely need this to run on Windows platforms. > > Thanks for your thoughts. > > Tauren -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
