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Objective

My team and I are building an online printer service for our neighborhood. There are a central server and several printers connected to this server via PC, and the clients could upload their files on the website to get them printed by the printers.

Problem

But the problem for current schema is that the clients have to upload files rather than hit the "print" button. And for the printer terminal, the operators have to download the files and print them manually.

Next solution

Now we are up to build a virtual printer for the clients to enable them use our printers by print command on their local machine.

Question

So here I'm looking for ideas for the solution.

For the printer end, things could be easy since we can just write a webapp to check the website regularly and print the files found before deleting them.

But for the client end, what should I do? I found software like GhostScript, RedMon, CUPS-PDF could be useful, but not sure about the details.

Note that besides transferring the files, we should keep track of the user's print fee so a login should be triggered when using "print" on clients' local machine.

SolessChong
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    So you're writing something pretty close to [this](http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/)? You may in that case check out how it works, it's doing pretty much what you'll need to do to get things working. – Joachim Isaksson Jun 21 '13 at 18:00
  • It's pretty close. However we need to integrate a user account system into it. – SolessChong Jun 21 '13 at 18:07

1 Answers1

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Not sure of your approach, but are you building http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/?

Depending on how much you are trying to build yourself, you can look at http://www.all2pdf.com/virtual-printer-driver-use.htm or http://www.zan1011.com/.

Robert
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