Windows 95 meets Mac OS X
My roommate is applying to law school. She’s filled out her applications and is just about to send them in. Unfortunately, the online law school application process uses ActiveX, so it only runs on Windows. That’s forced her to fill out the applications on her ancient Thinkpad 310D, running Windows 95 at a blazingly fast 133 MHz. So far so good — albeit slow — until the time came to print the applications.
Her old printer doesn’t seem to be working correctly. I don’t have any ink cartridges for my printer. She can’t print at work or at Kinko’s because the ActiveX control for the law school applications isn’t installed on those computers and she doesn’t have permission to install it. What to do?
I vaguely remembered that Windows could print to a file. Apparently it typically spits out printer-specific files, but if you’re printing to a PostScript printer, the *.prn files that it creates are actually PostScript files. And Panther’s Preview can convert PostScript to PDF.
Windows 95 let me install an HP LaserJet 4MP PostScript printer without having one attached and without having to download drivers. I could even set it up to print straight to a file every time. Now she as she prints each application to a file, I FTP it over to my PowerBook, rename it to have a .ps extension, double-click it to open it in Preview (I could use /usr/bin/pstopdf, but I like the UI), and save it as a PDF file. When we’re done, I’ll mail her the PDF files so she can print them out either at work or at Kinko’s.
This is quite a convoluted process to get around the lack of a working printer, but it’s interesting to see how all of the technologies fit together. And, of course, it’d be a lot harder without Panther, since I’d have to download a PostScript viewer and print each of them to PDF or build my own ps2pdf. Panther just makes it easier.
EJ Said,
November 15, 2003 @ 12:04 am
Another cool thing about Mac OS X (maybe previous OS versions too) is that if you have a Postscript printer and drag a ps file onto either a desktop printer or onto Print Center, it will send the file to your printer. I don’t know if the same process works for non-PS printers (i.e. it would have to do on the fly conversion), but for PS printers it works like a charm. It’s just one of those things that works like it should: “Hmm… I have a postscript file and I want to print. Let’s see what happens if I drag it onto my printer icon.”
Before Mac OS X, I there was a separate utility to send PS files to the program. Mac OS Classic’s desktop printing might have eliminated the need for that utility, but regardless it’s nice that Mac OS X has this feature.
Anyway, it’s cool that Preview supports viewing PS files. That’s something I didn’t know!