Programmatic print to desktop printer on paper

[cretaceous]

I'd not realised page by page programmatic printing to a desktop printer might be difficult!

I have a form letter and a database of names and addresses
I want to print them out one by one, each on its own page - in other words a traditional mail merge.

I don't want to use Word as everything else - sending emails and PDFs, sending SMS - is handled with PHP

I guess there must be an ajax solution to call the print process for each item.

Any tips or ideas?

[sneakyimp]

You could render your output as a pdf file: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php

I believe that gives you more print-oriented control.

HTML mail merge might be possible if you are very precise in your CSS design but I would imagine it takes quite a bit of experimentation and different users might have different results.

You might also have some luck with CSS print stylesheets: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/