running a script as settingsprogram or afterprintprogram

[McScotty]

I'm trying to convince bullzip to accept print jobs and create unique output files for each print job, without user intervention.

I've written a script which updates the Output value in settings.ini, to a unique valid value based on the current date+time.

I've named this script as both my SettingsProgram and AfterPrintProgram.

my script does not appear to run when I print, as the values in settings.ini do not change. When I run the script from the command line, it updates settings.ini properly. Also, when I schedule the script to run every minute in task scheduler, that works... but it doesn't provide the granularity I need, and it's stupid, if the hooks you've so kindly provided would actually run my script.

Can you help shed some light on the situation?

OS: WinXP SP2
script languge: kixtart (also tried simple batch files to no avail)

thanks!

[emendelson]

I'm not sure why the program doesn't run from settings.ini, but try using the short 8.3 filename for the program, like this:

AfterPrintProgram=c:\progra~1\BullZip\PDFPri~1\PostBull.exe

Unfortunately, as described in another thread, any program run from the SettingsProgram will NOT affect the path and filename of the output file. There doesn't seem to be a way to set the path and filename of the output file dynamically. This is documented on the BullZip product page, which says that the settings program can change only the author, description, etc.

BullZip PDF Printer is potentially by far the best of the shareware/freeware PDF printers, and the one thing that it seems to need is the ability to set the output filename dynamically.

(By the way, I've used AutoIt to build scripts that I run as executables, and they run successfully from settings.ini.)

[McScotty]

I found my answer in another product line -- PDFCreator.
This tool includes a facility to automatically save to a generated filename.

I find that PDFCreator has a lot more useful features than BullZip.