knowing if a printer is connected

[Peter Brigham MD]

This worked for me on my home printer, and I had high hopes for it,  
but if fails this morning here at work. The problem seems to be that  
with some printers the listing from the ioreg call has little relation  
to the name of the printer. For instance, my Brother laserjet MFC 8220  
(combo printer fax copier) has an ioreg listing of:

+-o IOUSBCompositeDevice at fd100000  <class IOUSBDevice, registered,  
matched, active, busy 0, retain 12>

and there is no way of telling that this is a Brother 8220 or relating  
it to the availablePrinters, not on the face of it, anyway.

I'm working on a solution that will involve storing the ioreg name of  
a given printer as a customprop "ioregListing[printerName]" More to  
come. I'm determined to make this work as invisibly as possible. It  
has long been a irritation for me that the system doesn't  
automatically just send print jobs to the available printer. There's  
no reason on earth why you should have to change printers manually  
(after the first time you use one, of course). The system knows what's  
plugged in, for goodness sake. [grrrr...]

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig


On Nov 21, 2009, at 11:36 PM, Phil Davis wrote:

> Everyone is doing it, so... here is what I came up with. Watch line  
> wraps please. Hopefully the comments explain what the code is doing.
>
>
> on mouseUp
>  answer UsbPrinterList()
> end mouseUp
>
>
> function UsbPrinterList
>  -- set item delimiter
>  set the itemDelimiter to tab
>   -- make a list of all active USB I/O devices
>  put shell("ioreg") into tActiveDeviceList
>  filter tActiveDeviceList with "*IOUSBDevice*" -- remove all but USB  
> devices from list
>  replace "@" with tab in tActiveDeviceList -- isolate device name
>  replace "+-o" with tab in tActiveDeviceList -- device name is item  
> 2 of each line
>   -- get all known printer names, whether active or not
>  put the availablePrinters into tPrinterNames
>   -- identify active USB printers in the USB device list
>  put empty into tUsbPrinters
>  repeat for each line tDeviceLine in tActiveDeviceList
>     put word 1 to -1 of item 2 of tDeviceLine into tDeviceName --  
> could be partial device name
>     get tPrinterNames
>     filter it with ("*" & tDeviceName & "*")
>     if it = empty then next repeat -- device is not a printer
>         -- USB device is a printer, so get full name
>     repeat for each line tFoundPrinter in it
>        put tFoundPrinter & cr after tUsbPrinters
>     end repeat
>  end repeat
>  delete last char of tUsbPrinters -- trailing CR
>   return tUsbPrinters
> end UsbPrinterList
>
>
> Thanks -
> Phil Davis
>
>
>
> JosepM wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In English work, but in Spanish and others languages don't.
>>
>> The result of the shell command is:
>> destino por omision del sistema: HP_Photosmart_C4200_series
>>
>> So we must check for the ":" and get the printer name.
>>
>>   set itemdel to ":"
>>   put item 2 of shell("lpstat -d") into tDefaultPrinter
>>
>>
>> function getDefaultPrinter
>>  put word 4 of shell("lpstat -d") into tDefaultPrinter
>>  --   shell returns:  system default destination: HP_DESKJET_845C
>>  replace "_" with space in tDefaultPrinter
>>  return tDefaultPrinter
>> end getDefaultPrinter
>>
>> The getActivePrinter get all the USB devices. In my case, my LaCie  
>> disk, the
>> iPhone, the DataTraveler and the HP printer.. How to filter between  
>> them?
>>
>> Salut,
>> Josep
>>
>
> -- 
> Phil Davis
>
> PDS Labs
> Professional Software Development
> http://pdslabs.net
>
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