Linux Gazette: PDF Service with Samba

“PDF documents provide a great way to pass around
documents on the Internet. They have many uses, such as sending
quotes and invoices to business clients. Two of the main reasons
the PDF format is so popular is that it preserves all of the
document’s formatting exactly and it is easily viewable on almost
all platforms. For many computer users stuck in the Windows
paradigm, creating PDF documents means forking over precious cash
to the folks at Adobe. However, this article will show you how to
use Linux, Samba, and Ghostscript to provide a PDF creation service
to both Windows and Linux users. Of course, all of this can be
obtained for free.

First, let’s take a look at the overall scheme of operation. We
will use Samba to provide a “pseudo-printer” service (it will look
like a standard printer to clients) that will use Ghostscript to
create a PDF document out of any Postscript printer job that is
queued onto it. We will then configure the Windows machines to use
this shared printer and send jobs to it in Postscript form.”

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