I have 2 main issues I'd like to solve, both around the idea of outputting a file to a specific path during an automation step.
- Using "print to file" functionality outputs a
.ps Postscript file rather than a .pdf as desired.
- Also using "print to file", my custom script is not executed. This means I can't set up a script to convert the
.ps to .pdf automatically.
If I don't use "print to file" I have to try to set environment variables before printing to keep track of a few different pieces of data needed for the filename, and pulling those in my script has proven unreliable.
There has to be a better way of doing this but the options I've tried so far have been hacky and not without bugs.
Hi,
the "print to file" checkbox isn't part of PDFCreator and will always create a .PS files instead of sending the data to the printer. Since there is no data sent to the printer, PDFCreator will not do anything.
Why/how does this impact the requirement to set environment variables?
Best regards
Robin
That explains it I guess, thanks.
The environment variables are a way to try and work around the fact that I can't automatically set a filename for the given output during our software's automation. We've used Win2PDF for doing this because it supports being given a filename but it has issues (sometimes it outputs 0 byte files...) so we've explored using PDFCreator instead.
The env variables aren't reliable because they don't seem to hold the correct values when read from the post-print script. I don't think that's a problem with PDFCreator, it's just something I've been struggling with.
If tokens and title replacements aren't sufficient,
you can call PDFCreator through the command line to supply a file name.
Or take full control through the COM interface.
I am sure one of these options will be able to help with the issue.