Printing with automator

Alright so heres the rundown.

I have a cannon printer hooked up to a g5, and the g5 is wirelessly networked with a PC in the house. I have tried everything possible to network the printer within the home network, but I have had no such luck. (However, I do have file sharing enabled between the two computers.)

Heres what I want to do:
-Save a file onto the g5 from the PC
-Have automator recognize the file name and print it. (The saved file would have the same name each time, so that automator could recognize it.)

Ewanog,

Automator can’t help until your printer setup is working.

Once it is, the Print Finder Items action puts the passed document into the printer queue, so the workflow is as simple as:

Get Specified Finder Items
Print Finder Items

Kevin

Would it be possible to post the file to a specific folder… that folder could have an action applied in it that basically prints the newest file in it, then moves it to the trash or another folder?

this is exactly what I’m attempting to do - Brother printer, networked but unable to print from the PC.
Simple workflow:
Setup Folder on Mac - automator action prints anything that goes in the folder, then deletes.

I am searching for more info on how to do it - or if the folder print action exists - I’ll post what I find

Ewanog,

Try this:

Print Finder Items (Finder lib)
Pause (Automator lib)
Move to Trash (Finder lib)

Save this is as a folder action for the folder you will be dumping files to.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin,

That looks like it should work - I tried it, but it stalls.

First of all it pops up a dialogue box asking to “continue” using the printer (so that it actually prints the document dropped on it) - not sure if there is a setting to deal with this.

On pressing the continue button, it doesn’t print the document for some reason - but then dutifully puts the document in the trash - which is the only part of the process that works so far.

What does the “pause” action actually do, and does it need to have a minimum time set (I’ve tried 0 and 10 seconds)?

I’ll keep tooling around but would appreciate any other suggestions.

thanks