SUMMARY: printing HTML in Solaris

From: Erwin Fritz (efritz@glja.com)
Date: Thu Jan 15 1998 - 16:02:00 CST


Many thanks to the people (names are given later) who took the time to
reply to my question, which was:

> The developers at my site are creating an application which produces
> reports in HTML format. I need a way to print these reports on a
Solaris
> 2.4 box so that they look as if they were printed from a browser.
>
> What I'm shooting for is something like this. The user runs the new
> application, which produces a number of HTML files. The user then uses

> some command like:
>
> command -d printer file1.html file2.html ...
>
> (or something similar) and the files are printed on the specified
> printer. The important thing here is that the files, when printed,
look
> the same as they do in a browser window.

Many people suggested Lynx. I tried that, but HTML printed in Lynx look
the way they appear in the Lynx screen (naturally), whereas I needed
something which handled the various fonts and sizes associated with the
different HTML attributes. Basically, I need to emulate the Print
function of either the Netscape GUI or the Internet Explorer GUI.

Other people suggested html2ps. I tried that too, but it doesn't support
HTML tables properly, and all the HTML documents in question use tables.
*sigh* That was the best answer by far, however, since it was the
closest thing to what I need.

One person suggested lwprequest, a Perl program. However, that software
also doesn't support tables.

To solve this problem, I'm going to have to write an RPC-based
client-server package that will send the file to an NT workstation. A
service there (the RPC server part) will open up the Netscape or IE GUI
and invoke the print option.

Thanks go to Frank Cusack, Stephen Harris, Benjamin Cline, Dan Pritts,
Tim Carlson, Igor Schein, Jason Zapman II, Angel Lopez Luengo, Jason
Harrell, Chuck Kenyon, Mark Hershberger, Sweth Chandramouli, Amol
Karnik, Jochen Bern, Rich Kulawiec, and Gerald Litteer.

--
Erwin Fritz
UNIX/NT/LAN Guy
Gilbert Laustsen Jung Associates Ltd.
http://www.glja.com



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