Tag: printing

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How-to: Merge multiple RTF files into a single PDF

[easyreview title=”Complexity rating” icon=”geek” cat1title=”Level of experience required, to follow this how-to.” cat1detail=”Linux only. And newbies may find this tricky.” cat1rating=”3.5″ overall=”false”]

I recently needed to generate a large quantity of forms automatically (around 2,500 of them) and printing them. I was using PHP as the generator – it’s great at processing and transforming text. And my base (template) file was originally created as a Word document, converted to RTF for ease of processing.

There is no easy and free way of printing out 2,500 RTF files from Windows, not that I’ve been able to find. It didn’t make sense to pay for a £200 application for something that I do so infrequently. So here is my (free) approach.

Make Linux do the hard work

I’m using an Ubuntu virtual machine for this how-to, but you can use almost any distribution, with a little modification of the steps below. When it comes to command line or scripted activities (which this tutorial lends itself to), Linux/Unix is simply more mature than Windows. This means that someone, somewhere has probably already created a tool for whatever activity you’re thinking of and moreover, made that tool free.

Converting to PDF: Ted

Ted is a fairly full-featured text processor for Linux. We’ll just be using some of Ted’s command line wizardry today.

Installing Ted

Ted logoYou can download a Ted package here. I’m installing this on an Ubuntu 12.04.1 machine so I chose this package: ubuntu12041:ted-2.23-amd64.deb.

I keep all third party packages I install in a directory, /root/installed-packages, for future reference. So this is what I did, from a command line (SSH connection). First, I know that Ted has some dependencies, so I dealt with those:

apt-get update
apt-get install libxpm4 libtiff4 libgtk2.0-0 libpaper1
apt-get -f install

Then downloaded and install Ted:

wget http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted/ubuntu12041:ted-2.23-amd64.deb
dpkg -i ubuntu12041\:ted-2.23-amd64.deb

Combining files: pdfmerge

Abiding by the principle of “do one thing well”, guess what pdfmerge does?

Installing pdfmerge

If you’re using a RedHat-derived distribution, you’re in luck, there’s a pre-built package. If you’re using Ubuntu though, here goes. Download the source [iwrtooltip title=”a compressed archive of files”]tarball[/iwrtooltip] from here. Again, I’m starting in my directory /root/installed-packages.

wget http://dmaphy.github.com/pdfmerge/pdfmerge-1.0.4.tar.bz2
tar jxf pdfmerge-1.0.4.tar.bz2
cp pdfmerge-1.0.4/pdfmerge /usr/local/bin
rm -rf pdfmerge-1.0.4

Put it all together

Now the utilities are installed, you can run the following simple bash script to convert your individual RTF files into PDFs, then merge them all into a single PDF. I put the RTF files in one directory, then the PDF into the directory above it in the directory tree. We use a script that is bundled with Ted – you may need to check the precise location.

for filename in ./*.rtf
do
/usr/share/Ted/examples/rtf2pdf.sh $filename
done;
pdfmerge *.pdf ../all.pdf

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mark de Does for Ted and to Dominic Hopf for pdfmerge.

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SOLVED: “Access is denied, unable to remove” when deleting printer

It’s amazing to see that many years after I first wrote this post, visitors are still finding it useful!

If you really want to understand what’s going on under the hood, the Windows Internals books are the place to start. In the interests of transparency: this is an affiliate link. See my affiliate disclosure page for an explanation.

Many organisations push out printer installations via Active Directory. If you want to tidy up those printers (removing ones you don’t use) you may find Windows 7 doesn’t let you delete them, even though you may be a local administrator and even if you use an elevated Explorer session:

Access denied error

Use the following steps to resolve this annoyance.

From an elevated command prompt:

C:\Windows\system32>net stop spooler
The Print Spooler service is stopping.
The Print Spooler service was stopped successfully.

Then fire up regedit. Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections and delete the offending printer:

printers regedit

Finally, restart the print spooler:

C:\Windows\system32>net start spooler
The Print Spooler service is starting.
The Print Spooler service was started successfully.