Tom Clancy

Printing from Python on a Mac

I recently automated the download of one of my favorite cryptic crosswords, both because I am nerdy and because it went behind an extravagantly high paywall. In the process I decided I wanted Sunday mornings to be even more leisurely and made the script print the PDF after downloading, thusly:

import os
import logging
import sys
from pathlib import Path

import requests

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

PATH_TO_WRITE = Path("/your/file/location.pdf")
# download stuff elided for brevity

def print_pdf_from_link(pdf_link: str | None, write_to: Path = PATH_TO_WRITE):
    if not pdf_link:
        logger.error("No PDF link provided, exiting")
        sys.exit(1)
    pdf_request = requests.get(pdf_link)
    with open(write_to, "wb") as f:
        f.write(pdf_request.content)
    os.system(f"lpr -P Brother_MFC_L2750DW_series {write_to}")
    write_to.unlink()
    write_to.with_suffix(".ps").unlink()

The only trick is getting the name of the printer (Brother_MFC_L2750DW_series here) from your machine. You can get that with lpstat -p. The weird side effect is you wind up with two files, one with the .ps printer extension and one with the .pdf extension. Rather than figure out why, I am just stomping on it at the same time, which showed me pathlib has that neat little with_suffix method.

UPDATE 02-02-26: You can scale the print job with -o scaling=X where X is a number between 1 and 800.

Tom Clancy

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