printing - Send document to printer with C#

Question

I've been given a requirement for an internal web application to send documents to a printer transparently. The idea would be that the user can select their nearest printer, and the web application would send their print jobs to the printer they selected.

The first printer we have to roll out against are Canons, so my questions is: How would I go about sending a document to print aross the network to a specific Canon? The type of Cannon is question is an iR5570 and the documents that will be said will mainly be Word and PDFs

I'm currently working my way through the terrible, IE only Canon Developer site, but I'm kinda hoping someone can point me in the right direction or point me at a 3rd party assembly :)

Answer 1

Many printers and multifunction devices today support the printing of PDFs directly, this may solve one of your problems. Simply have the PDF sent to the printer. In fact, some even support the sending of a URL and the printer will then go get the document and print it. Lexmark for sure does this and I think a few other vendors do as well. This still mean you have to deal with the Word document. Word 2007 supports PDF (with the add-in installed from Microsoft) and I've used this function programatically with great success in C#.

Here's the code for that:

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.ApplicationClass msWord = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.ApplicationClass();

object paramUnknown = Type.Missing;
object missing = Type.Missing;
object paramSaveChangesNo = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveOptions.wdDoNotSaveChanges;
//object paramFonts = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.wde
object paramFormatPDF = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatPDF;
object paramTrue = true;
object paramReadOnly = true;  
object sourceDoc = @"c:input.doc"                              
object target = @"c:output.pdf";

msWord.Visible = false;

//open .doc
msWord.Documents.Open(ref sourceDoc, ref paramUnknown, ref paramReadOnly, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown);

//so it won't show on the taskbar
msWord.Application.Visible = false;
msWord.WindowState = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWindowState.wdWindowStateMinimize;

//save .doc to new target name and format
msWord.ActiveDocument.SaveAs(ref targetDoc, ref paramFormatPDF, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramTrue, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown);

msWord.ActiveDocument.Close(ref missing, ref missing, ref missing);

msWord.Quit(ref paramSaveChangesNo, ref paramUnknown, ref paramUnknown);

Lastly, if your device doesn't support PDF printing then you could use Ghostscript or other tools to convert your PDF to PS or even PCL. Not the greatest as this mean running a little unmanaged code or worst case, shelling out and executing the GS command line, that being said, we currently do this in one of our web apps and it works well. As an aside, we don't do it for print but rather the joining of a number of PDFs togheter, but in the end it will work the same.