Samba Network TIFF Printing

For over a year now, we have been using a samba shared network printer to generate TIFF files from electronic documents so that they can be imported directly in to iPerms.  The TIFF printer is simply a script that takes PostScript input from the client machine’s print driver and converts it to an iPerms compatible TIFF image.  This is primarily useful for an Army installation, but may be relevant if your site is using some other form of document archiving system that uses TIFF images.  I can say that ours has spit out over 30,000 pages.

How it works:

Users setup the printer on their system using a PS print driver.  (On Vista, I usually use the HP Color Laserjet 2500 PS driver)  When they print a document to the printer, it generate a PDF, converts the PDF to a TIFF file and removes the interim PDF.  The completed file is dropped into a share with 0600 file permissions.  I use 0600 because I set the share to only display readable files.  Thus, while everyone is printing to the same folder, they only see their files when they open the share.  Less chance of PII leakage.
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