Mon, Dec 8 2003 at 10:31AM PST • Contributed by: FlyBoy
As many of you know, Virtual PC's ability to print to a Mac printer is broken in Panther, and Microsoft has yet to post a fix, or even acknowledge a problem on their support site. A workaround published in the MacFixit Forums is to print to a file in Virtual PC and save that file on a shared disk. One can then drag those "*.prn" files onto a desktop printer in Panther and be able to print.
One can also convert these .prn files to PDF, using the ghostscript command ps2pdf. Unfortunately, ps2pdf doesn't seem to handle batch processing of files with automated file extension substitution. There is probably a way to do this in bash or tcsh, but I couldn't figure it out.
So to make batch processing work for me, I wrote a little perl program that will take any files that end in ".prn" passed on the command line (including file globs like "*"), convert the files to PDF, and save the new file with a .pdf extension. Though I haven't gotten that far yet, this perl script could be embedded into an AppleScript application, allowing one to drag and drop the .prn files onto the applet.
Read the rest of the hint for the script...
Here's the code. I'm a perl newbie, so go easy on me if you see ways to make the code below more efficient.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#MyPS2PDF.plx
#takes <STDIN> which consists of a list filenames and
#uses ps2pdf to convert to pdf files
#Norman A. Cohen, MD
#29 November 2003
use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Basename;
foreach my $arg (@ARGV) {
my ($base, $path, $type)=fileparse($arg,qr{\.\w+});
my $newext="\.pdf";
my $newname=$path.$base.$newext;
# make sure file extension is .prn
# (assumes that this will assure correct filetype)
if ($type =~ /\.prn/) {
print "Converting $arg into pdf file $newname.\n";
my $command = "ps2pdf $arg $newname";
system $command;
}
else
{
print "$arg is not a Windows .prn file. Skipping file!\n";
}
}
