Printing to URL

Question

I have an application for job-control that has only one output option, namely printing.

I would prefer these jobs to be sent by SMS.

I would be able to use one of the many SMS-services on the web that allow SMS to be sent by URL calls. Unfortunately I can not find software/drivers that allow me to print to webaddress or something along those lines.

Is there such software? If not what other solutions could you think of?

Writing software in C# or a PHP website would not be a problem for me if this helps in your solution.

Answer 1

You can print to a URL, you need to set up a port. If you look at the printer properties for a printer, you will see a list of the available ports and, if you have local admin rights, you can create your own port which can be a URL.

Add a printer port of type "Standard TCP/IP Port". The IP address can be a name and can include a path if required.

The big problem, of course, is that the resulting URL has to accept and respond with the appropriate protocol messages. So you will need to research how to implement the appropriate protocol. The easiest is probably LPR which is one of the UNIX simple print protocols.

Having second thoughts about this though, I think there may be a simpler answer. If you use a "Print to File" setting, you could easily set up a monitor that checked for new files, read them and passed them to a web service. You could do this with something like AutoHotkey if you wanted to.