Scheduled printing weather forecasts

Does anyone know of any low-cost (or less!) software that could automatically send a forecast page to a printer at a given time (or using system scheduler). I would prefer it if it could be done silently, without opening a browser, and, above all, never MSIE. My default browser is Firefox. I would wish it to be able to preset the printer attributes, such as two-sided printing. Am I asking too much?

I know of iOpus, but it doesn’t appear to be able to work except with MSIE and not with adjustment of the printer attributes.

Perhaps use something like HTML to PDF Converter - Convert Web Page to PDF File with HTML to PDF Converter and then schedule a print of the resulting file using Acrobat? I haven’t tried that though.

What’s the source of the forecast, wxsim?

Niko : yes, http://www.cypenv.org/wxfcast/forecast.php to be precise.

Chris: OK, thanks, I see that. Have to see how it would handle a php file, though. Can you have a command line print command in Acrobat?

This may work, although it’s unsupported…

Executes the Reader and prints a file - AcroRd32.exe /p filename

Possibly even better if you can work out the parameters!

AcroRd32.exe /t path printername drivername portname

  • Initiates Acrobat Reader, prints a file while suppressing the Acrobat print dialog box, then terminates Reader.

The four parameters of the /t option evaluate to path, printername, drivername, and portname (all strings).

printername - The name of your printer.
drivername - Your printer driver’s name. Whatever appears in the Driver Used box when you view your printer’s properties.
portname - The printer’s port. portname cannot contain any “/” characters; if it does, output is routed to the default port for that printer.

Why acrobat? Where’s the .pdf?

HTML to PDF Converter - Convert Web Page to PDF File with HTML to PDF Converter turns the web page into a PDF which can then be printed.

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