Line printing with PHP?

[auyongtc]

Hi all,

I need to be able to print out line by line on a dot-matrix printer for a system I'm designing via PHP/MySQL for my dad's work.

Well, how do I port out a single print line (with newline feed) to LPT1 (either server/client end no prob, both on the same system).

I know the from PHP 4.0.4 onwards, there's a "printer()" function for Windows... but I might not be using it for Windows coz of licensing, might as well fix up a Linux system and let it run with X and Netscape/Opera and that will be free solution totally... anyone can help on the line printing part?

[nobbie]

Hi,

you can try this:

// path to lpd
$lpd = '/usr/sbin/lpd';

// open process file pointer to printer/lpd
$printer = popen($lpd, "w") or die();

// write to printer
fputs($printer, wordwrap("Hello World!", 25, "\n"));

// close printer/lpd process
pclose($printer);

if you have lpd setup. Otherwise, maybe try opening the printer device directly:

$printer = fopen("/dev/lp0", "w");

if

[auyongtc]

Thanks Nobbie,

Just realised that my dad isn't comfy with Linux and would rather have Windows on it...

oh well, any similar line printing daemon like lpd for Windows? Or can I access the printer device directly via LPT1 in command line?

How do I do this in PHP? The environment with be Windows with Apache/PHP/MySQL on the same machine with a dot-matrix printer connected to LPT1 (which I don't have at the moment to test out the scenario), anyone can help? Nobbie?

[nobbie]

Shouldn't be too difficult on Windows.

You can just pipe a text file to LPT1.

From PHP just call a system(), exec() or use backticks to run the command:

type file.txt > lpt1

[auyongtc]

But what if I don't want the hassle of piping a text file? Rather, I'd just want to print out 1 line at a time... like you imagine this:

Someone time-in/log-in to the system, and it prints out one line (something like a timestamp) on the dot-matrix printer... it would be easier running lpr like command but for Windows, how do I achieve that?

Help pls! 🙂

[nobbie]

You can try this:

echo 'login date blah blah ...' > lpt1:

the colon ":" after lpt1 does something with the flushing or buffering or something.

[auyongtc]

Nobbie, does the echo 'blah' > lpt1: accept line breaks as in \n or something? I would want to be able to put in line breaks. Thanks.

[nobbie]

Hi,

I don't know how to do line breaks in an echo command in DOS, so i'd do it this way:

$lines = split("\n", wordwrap($text, 20, "\n"));

while(list($key, $line) = each($lines) ) {
echo '$line' > lpt1:;
}