Question

I’m trying to use win32api to output a PDF document to a particular printer.

win32api.ShellExecute(0, "print", filename, '/d:"%s"' % printername, ".", 0)

filename is a full pathname to the file, and printname is the name of the target printer I get by going through the output of win32api.EnumPrinters(6).

The file is sent to the Windows default printer even if printername is the name of a different target (my expectation is that passing a specific printer would send the named file to that printer, rather than the default).

Any hints as to what I’m doing wrong? Is there a different way of generically printing a PDF file to a specific printer? Barring all else, is there a way of temporarily changing the default printer from my program?

Answer 1

MikeHunter’s answer was a decent starting point.

The proposed solution is calling out to Acrobat or Acrobat Reader to do the actual printing, rather than going through the win32api. For my purposes, this is sufficient:

from subprocess import call

acrobat = "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Acrobat.exe" ## Acrobat reader would also work, apparently
file = "C:\path\to\my\file.pdf"
printer = "Printer Name Goes Here"

call([acrobat, "/T", file, printer])

That starts up Acrobat, and prints the given file to the named printer even if it’s not the Windows default. The first print job processed this way takes a few seconds (I’m assuming this is the Acrobat service being started and cached in memory), subsequent jobs print instantly. I have not done any kind of load testing on this, but I assume the call is less than trivial, so don’t trust it for massive throughput.