Printing through PHP

[Anon]

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to let PHP activate a printer through the Internet?

Real life example:

I work for a graphical business where we get customers that need to fill out a print-orderform in paper. We would like to automate the process where customers can fill out their form online, send it through the internet and our in-house printer prints the form. Is this technically possible? And if so, does anyone have experience with this?

All feedback is greatly appreciated!

Kevin

[Anon]

PHP has built in printer functions for windows servers. I am not aware of any *nix enabled printer functions.

[brandonschnell]

but using the backtick operators or the exec()/system() command it should possible to create a submit a print job from any operating system

[Anon]

In Linux (and I suspect in other OS's), depending on the type of printer device you use, you can pass data directly to it by simply catting some text to the device itself. My script looks something like this ...

exec("cat print.txt > /dev/ttyS0");

Some printers require you to pass hex code instead of ascii. In this case, I am running on Linux and Apache with PHP as an Apache mod, and I have PHP write the text file, then exec() the cat command to send the data to the printer. It is in ascii format.