PDF and Multi-Page Files

Many workflows utilize PDF exclusively for submission of work to hot folders, and many rely on multi-page PDF files. The code sample below illustrates generation of a list of every page to be printed in a hot folder, when many of those pages are in multi-page PDF files.

The code below can be intgrated with other hot folder examples to support this. The function 'makeListOfJobsFromFolder' can be used to produce a list of pages to be processed, that will include all the pages of multi-page files. Note that this code depends on the 'pdfAnalysis.dyn' feature of Wasatch XML Access.

Caution - Multi-page files are only supported if all pages have the same size.

Python 3 Source Code

# Sample code for making a list of jobs from hot folder that includes multi-page PDF
#
import os
from os import listdir
from os.path import isfile, join
import urllib.request
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

def pdfProperties(wasatchSoftRIP, fileName): # returns page count, width, height (inches)
    url = 'http://' + wasatchSoftRIP + '/pdfAnalysis.dyn?'
    url += urllib.parse.quote_plus(fileName)  # escape all special characters in data
    p = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
    b = p.read()
    p.close()
    x = ET.fromstring(b.decode("utf-8")) # parse the XML retured by SoftRIP
    return int(x.find('PAGECOUNT').text), float(x.find('WIDTH').text), float(x.find('HEIGHT').text)
def makeListOfJobsFromFolder(wasatchSoftRIP, folder): # returns list of lists with; name, page count, width, height (inches)
    jobs = []
    for f in listdir(folder):
        if(isfile(join(folder, f))):
            pageCount = 1  # default for all files other than PDF
            width = 0.0 # defaults to zero as unknown
            height = 0.0 # defaults to zero as unknown
            filename, file_extension = os.path.splitext(f)
            if '.pdf' == file_extension.lower():
                pageCount, width, height = pdfProperties(wasatchSoftRIP, join(folder, f))
            for page in range(1, pageCount + 1): # simply indent this block to limit processing to PDF only
                t = []
                t.append(join(folder, f))
                t.append(page)
                t.append(width)
                t.append(height)
                jobs.append(t)
    return jobs

#
# demo code - the loop below can be replaced with logic to process the pages
#
wasatchSoftRIP = '127.0.0.1:80'  # localhost - edit this to address your Wasatch SoftRIP
demoFolder =  '/00temp/hotfldr' # hot folder
jobs = makeListOfJobsFromFolder(wasatchSoftRIP, demoFolder)
for t in jobs:
   print("File: '" + t[0] + "', Page: " + str(t[1]) + ", Width, Height = " + str(t[2]) + ", " + str(t[3]))