Introduction
The purpose of this project is to ease the transformation from ps
to pdf. It is easy to ps2pdf, which is a command line
utility under linux, but the quality is sometimes low, and it is un-easy
to use especially in a a desktop environment.
The solution I found is not novative, it comes in the integration:
the idea is to use pieces of software that does it already and to
glue them together.
The mechanism
The postcripted file is recepted by the printer daemon,
The filter transform (ghostcript) it in pdf,
The filter decides whether to drop it in a specified place
of the filesystem or to send per email.
It is a tweaking of the lpd filter. Instead of interpretating
Postscript for a printer, software transform them to pdf,
and then send them either to a specified directory, or send it per
email in a specified domain.
The interest is when used either with linux, windows or MAC
OS. The lpd serving the alambic filter is seen as a standard
networked PostScript printer, as a result you only have to install
a networked postcript printer. I normaly use the apple laserwriter
driver for MAC OS and windows. The trick to get the username to
who you can send the email is either to make a public account
(ouuaa! this is not nice for security nice), or to use the usual login
mechanism. So samba (windows connectivity) or netatalk (apple
connectivity) has to be configured in the good way.
Everything comes in the configuration.
