Fun with ippeveprinter

[debiantriage]

cups-pdf is available in Debian and other distributions. A facet of its operation is that every submitted file (even a PDF) is first converted to PostScript, which is then converted to PDF. This might be seen as suboptimal.

ippeveprinter runs a command or a script when a job to be printed enters its spool directory, so let's execute

/usr/sbin/ippeveprinter-c $HOME/pdfsave -f application/pdf "Print to PDF" &

The script pdfsave is

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p $HOME/PDF/
A=$(pdfinfo "$1" | grep texttopdf)
if [ ! -z "$A" ]
then
   /usr/bin/pdftocairo -pdf "$1" $HOME/PDF/$(basename $1)
else
   cp $1 $HOME/PDF
fi

PDFs that have been processed by the texttopdf filter are not searchable; pdftocairo makes them so.

The Print_to_PDF printer is, of course, accessible on the local network. Should this not be wanted, a firewall rule might be the answer:

iptables -I INPUT \! --src 192.168.7.44 -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8001 -j DROP

Unlike an application's Print to File feature, Print_to_PDF can be used for batch printing with lp.

[gmuth]

Great idea. However I have difficulties getting ippeveprinter to run in docker:

docker run --rm anujdatar/cups ippeveprinter "Everywhere"
Error: Unable to initialize DNS-SD.