Hi fellow self-hosting lemmings,
In an SME setting, I’m looking for a service to regularly fetch mails from an IMAP server and print incoming mails and attachments on a local network printer based on rules (e.g., only print mails where the subject contains a specific word.)
Does a solution like that exist, ideally with a browser frontend to set it up?
Thank you!
BTW, if you do end up using this method, I’d love to see your implementation some day. Node Red is so useful and intuitive IMO, and people sharing their solutions is valuable.
One deep dive into the IPP protocol, printer drivers, and specific supported formats (“what the hell is an octet-stream?!”) later, I have something functional.
I’m not a JS guy, so I don’t know if it’s a very node-y way to do it. But except for the pages coming out a little scaled this works:
Edit to briefly explain what this does: The mail node ingests unread emails and passes them forward to a function node that checks for pdf attachments. Those are passed forward one by one to a function node that takes care of converting the pdf to pcl (my printer supposedly knows how to handle pdf 1.7 but doesn’t, so I had to resort to this) and passes it to the IPP node as a data buffer .
spoiler
[ { "id": "86082bed0ed29155", "type": "IPPrint", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Print to Network", "IP": "10.10.0.19:631/ipp/print", "JOB_name": "default_job_name", "authuser": "", "authpassword": "", "authcheck": "", "x": 780, "y": 120, "wires": [ [ "b1a8b92ede8a78a5" ] ] }, { "id": "b1a8b92ede8a78a5", "type": "debug", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "debug 1", "active": true, "tosidebar": true, "console": false, "tostatus": false, "complete": "true", "targetType": "full", "statusVal": "", "statusType": "auto", "x": 960, "y": 120, "wires": [] }, { "id": "1fb7fc3843af8e05", "type": "function", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Convert PDF to PCL", "func": "const baseOptions = {\n width: 2480,\n height: 3508,\n density: 300,\n preserveAspectRatio: true,\n format: 'PCL'\n};\n\n// prepare conversion function\nconst convert = await pdf2pic.fromBuffer(msg.payload, baseOptions);\n// set additional conversion options\nconvert.setGM\n// bulk convert the whole input buffer to a pcl output buffer\nconvert.bulk(-1, {responseType: \"buffer\"}).then((outputs)=>{\n // pass each page on to the printer\n outputs.forEach((output, index) => {\n msg.payload = output.buffer;\n if(msg.topic){\n let jobname = msg.topic\n }\n msg.JOBName = (msg.topic ? msg.topic : \"Mailjob\").concat(\" \", index+1, \"/\", outputs.length);\n msg.docFormat = \"application/octet-stream\";\n node.send(msg);\n });\n});\n", "outputs": 1, "timeout": 0, "noerr": 0, "initialize": "", "finalize": "", "libs": [ { "var": "pdf2pic", "module": "pdf2pic" } ], "x": 560, "y": 120, "wires": [ [ "86082bed0ed29155" ] ] }, { "id": "224317e794da3cb5", "type": "e-mail in", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Mail ingest", "protocol": "IMAP", "server": "test.mail.com", "useSSL": false, "autotls": "always", "port": "143", "authtype": "BASIC", "saslformat": true, "token": "oauth2Response.access_token", "box": "INBOX", "disposition": "Read", "criteria": "UNSEEN", "repeat": "300", "fetch": "auto", "inputs": 0, "x": 160, "y": 80, "wires": [ [ "2fedaa18c9394b89" ] ] }, { "id": "2fedaa18c9394b89", "type": "function", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "PDF Filter", "func": "if(msg.attachments.length > 0){\n msg.attachments.forEach(function(attachment) {\n if(attachment.contentType == \"application/pdf\"){\n var newmsg = {};\n newmsg.topic = msg.topic;\n newmsg.filename = attachment.filename;\n newmsg.payload = attachment.content;\n node.send(newmsg);\n }\n });\n}", "outputs": 1, "timeout": 0, "noerr": 0, "initialize": "", "finalize": "", "libs": [], "x": 360, "y": 80, "wires": [ [ "1fb7fc3843af8e05" ] ] }, { "id": "3d8f7ad8e6b56d46", "type": "inject", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Test print", "props": [ { "p": "payload" }, { "p": "topic", "vt": "str" } ], "repeat": "", "crontab": "", "once": false, "onceDelay": 0.1, "topic": "", "payload": "", "payloadType": "date", "x": 160, "y": 160, "wires": [ [ "683ed6fe7c10540d" ] ] }, { "id": "683ed6fe7c10540d", "type": "file in", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "", "filename": "/data/2517.pdf", "filenameType": "str", "format": "", "chunk": false, "sendError": false, "encoding": "none", "allProps": false, "x": 340, "y": 160, "wires": [ [ "1fb7fc3843af8e05" ] ] } ]Nicely done, for not a JS guy. I’d have be a while longer figuring out that process.
Not sure what to suggest on the scaling, that might be happening in your conversion to PCL, you might be able to execute that as a ghostscript process on the host and then just stream the resulting file out of the filesystem to the print node, or even just drop it to a queue folder and cut the IPP node out entirely to eliminate it as a source of the scaling.
Edit: https://github.com/NickNaso/ghostscript4js
A very welcome compliment after this ordeal. Thank you! :)
The cleanest way to solve the scaling issue would probably be to go into the pdf2pic module and hack it open to accept the “pcl:fit-to-page” option that GraphicsMagick (the underlying software package doing the actual conversion from PDF to PCL) supports. (Supposing it actually does what it says. I’m not so sure about anything in printer land anymore.)
But since this whole thing is for internal documents only and the scaling can probably be estimated by choosing better values for width/height to account for printer margins I most likely won’t bother.
Thanks again for suggesting Node-RED. I’m very happy with the result.