An easy way to print remotely

Scripting Forums Automator
#1

This is probably old news, but I came up with a simple solution to print from a remote location using DropBox and Automator.

  1. Create a folder in Drop Box called something like “PDFs to Print”.
  2. Create an Automator Folder Action for the folder, which does the following:
    a. Get Selected Finder Items
    b. Run Shell Script:
    for f in “$@”
    do
    lpr “$f” -o media=Letter
    done
    c. Move Finder Items To Trash

Now from any machine that’s connected to DropBox (be it a Mac, PC, iPad, etc) you can print be getting/creating a PDF and moving it into your “PDFs to Print” folder. The items will go to your default printer, but you can pick a printer using a “-P” option to lpr. I added the “-o media=Letter” because my Xerox printer defaults to a4 for some reason. (You can change the lpr defaults using lpoptions from a Terminal window.)