is this possible?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 07:59:42 -0700, scrimp wrote:

> I am using reportlab not to generate PDF files, 

Isn't that amazing! I'm also using reportlab not to generate PDF files
too! I installed the program, and it just sits there, not generating as
many PDF files as I don't want for as long as I don't want them.

:-)

> but I want to be able
> to print them without having to install acrobat reader. I looked
> through the users guide and found nothing about printing to a printer
> (programmatically). I want to be able to automate the printing of
> reports when they are available. Does anyone know how this is done
> using reportlab? thanks!

As others have suggested, if you have to deal with PDF files without
Acrobat, you could use ghostscript. Also pre-installed on many versions
of Linux, and probably other Unixes as well, is pdf2ps which will convert
the PDF file to a pure postscript file, which you can then print to any
printer which understands postscript.

If you are using Windows, you can possibly find open source or free
software to do these things. Google is your friend: www.google.com
But the chances are you'll have to install *something* -- compared to even
the most impoverished Linux distro, Windows is very much "batteries not
included", and while Python does come with many batteries, a full-blown
postscript interpreter is not one of them.



-- 
Steven.