Wednesday, January 29, 2014

wincloudprint.py: Google Cloud Print Windows service

We're thinking of replacing my wife's netbook with a Chromebook, but printing is an issue. Our laser printer is over a decade old and while it works fine on our network (with a network adapter) it certainly doesn't support Google Cloud Print. Google really should have added support for local network printers. Their standard solution is a proxy that runs on some computer on the network via Chrome. But the standard way of doing that has two problems: (1) Chrome presumably takes up a lot of memory (I haven't checked just how much) and I don't want it running in the background all the time, and (2) it runs as a user application, not as a service, so a user for whom this has been configured needs to be actually logged in on the computer. Google has a solution to (2), but I didn't manage to get it working.

Fortunately, I managed to adapt the Linux python scripts from cloudprint to make a Windows solution, available here as "wincloudprint" (GPL3). Alas, installation is a bit of a bear due to license issues (I can't just include everything in one self-contained download): you need to install python, pywin32, SumatraPDF and wincloudprint. (SumatraPDF is used for handling the actual printing.) All the instructions are at the link. I don't know know that anybody other than myself will be interested in this, but I thought I'd share it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Philosopher and amateur programmer? Does this qualify as polymath?