How can I Send lots of data to a printer without displaying it on the page

[acidbox]

I have a list of clients (about 50,000) that is about 500 pages long. To show this, I have a webpage that lists all the clients and pages them in increments of 100 clients per page.

I'd like to be able to print (to a phyiscal printer) the entire list of clients, but the problem is, I don't know how to do it without displaying all 50,000 records on the screen at the same time. This creates a serious memory problem when PHP tries to parse and display all of them at once.

Is there a way to somehow run the query and parse the results into a printer spool (like print preview) via PHP headers or something instead of displaying the output to the browser?

I'm struggling with this, so if anyone has any good ideas, it'd be much appreciated.

[thorpe]

If your trying to do this on a clients printer, you'd be out of luck.

[cahva]

Most of the modern printers have ftp-cabability. If its only one printer that you are using and has ftp built in, you can create the printable pages with php and send them to printer with php's ftp functions(as postscript usually). We have made our own invoice program and we usually have to create hundreds of invoices and print them. First We create pdf's witf fpdf(PHP pdf class, very good) and then use shell program pdf2ps(pdf to postscript) and send the files with ftp.

Ofcourse you can skip the pdf thing and convert the docs straight to ps and send it via ftp..

[etully]

We use CUPS for this. We create a printer in Cups (even if the printer is somewhere out on the Internet) and then we use lpr to spool the data to the printer. It never hits a computer screen.