Printing

triponline

I am considering building a prototype of a dispatch system. one of the requirements will likely be printing from the MySql database as soon as a mesage is entered form a remote location on the web.

i. e.
Someone New Brunswick goes to the dispatch site, located on a virtual server in Chicago, and enters his request.

The MySql database receives the informaton then . . . some PHP magic occurs and PRESTO!! The printer starts printing the info to a printer without any human interaction.

Anything is possible in this day and age if you have enough money but I have none. Hopefully this can be done cheap!

Thanks
bob

planetsim

PHP does have printer functions. Unfortuneatly i dont think its possible to say printer on. Print this.

I guess you'll need to use a program function for that.

But do a search on the manual for Printer. Its not very well documented. But some people here can help. I myself do not have enough knowledge about printer functions in php to help you.

If there isnt a way to print the actual page. Remember theres javascript.

triponline

I have never seen anyone reply so fast! Thanks!

I am aware of and have used the javascript button but it does require someone to press a button. I'll continue to look around and would appreciate any thoughts form any one else.

Ok, dummy me. All I had to do was o check the php site. There is a funtion to handle this and anyone interested can follow this link.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.printer-start-doc.php

It does appear however, that the script would have to be located on a server on the location where the printer exists. Moreover it would require a Windows OS (Yuck!)

A comment on the php site reads:

As stated on the index page for all the printer functions, these are supported under Win32 only...in fact, they're frontends API calls. I'd go ahead and say that they would probably never be ported to *nix because of the many various ways of handling printers. Windows, for all its faults, at least has a unified printing system.

ARGGGHHHH!

There must be some way around this.

Bob