printing series of documents?

deuce868

I am working on a project that due to specific needs of the papers being submitted, submitters submit MS Word documents to the online system. A team of judges need to view each submission and score it. I want to allow them to print out all of the submitted MS Word documents. If they were just web pages I could toss in page breaks and compile them all in a list.

Does anyone know of any tricks that would allow me to print out a seriers of submitted Word documents in a chain without forcing the judges to manually open one file at a time and print?

Thanks

Roger_Ramjet

Basic while loop isn't it? While there is a filename left in the array, loop through and print it. I assume we are starting with an array of filenames! The array can be posted to the script when the user selected the files, or it could be a query resultset when the user submitted a search.

deuce868

ok, then my question is how to force print a MS Word document then?

The only way I know to open a MS Word document is to provide the user a link to it and then the user gets the option to either open or save the document.

Is there some way to open them in series at once? I know I can pass an array of file names, but getting from there to opening/printing a MS Word doc is where I can't find a bridge.

Roger_Ramjet

See the following, especially the user comments at the bottom: discussion of forced downloads. This will form the body of the while/if/for loop.
readfile

Now I know that many people here know heaps more on this subject, never actually scripted a word download, but it should help.

Weedpacket

Displaying a Word document would require sending the appropriate Content-Type: header. (www.iana.org has the official list.) That will tell the client what sort of document it's receiving: what it does with that depends on the client and what the user has installed. If, for example, the user is using Internet Explorer and has Word (or Word Viewer?) installed then Word will take over IE's window to display the document. Other browers may start Word in a separate window (or at least offer to start Word in a separate window). The user may have some other application (such as OpenOffice) that can read Word documents, and that will be used instead. Others still would have to settle for saving the file.

As for printing on paper: you'll have to assume that the user will do that if they so choose.

[Edit: application/msword]