How would I create a PDF print server?

I have some old workstations with WindowsXP that I can install pretty much anything on, an office with about 80 people, a wintel environment, an existing Server 2003 file/printer server, and everybody wants to be able to print PDFs, preferably in color, and preferably with the option to add password encryption to those PDFs. Oh, and license costs for Adobe's PDF print server are prohibitive.

I'd rather not have to write code, I'm more of a scripter than a programmer in capability. So PHP or Perl based solutions would probably be a preference, though I'm willing to try anything a few times.

Optimally, I'd like a system where the PDF processing is handled by one (or more) of these old workstations. A shared PDF Printer on the print server that anybody could install would direct jobs sent to it to this old workstation which would process the files, creating the PDF and adding security if so requested, and then drop the resulting file out into the personal network directory of whoever printed the file.

File names aren't important, to prevent dealing with duplicates I'd rather they simply be a string based on date and time.

What sort of libraries or scripts are out there that I should look at? If you've done something like this, how'd you do it? What should I stay away from and why?

Solution 1:

You can install PDFCreator on one of the computers, then share it out. The other computers will have to Connect to the Shared Printer (which can be done by script or GPO, or manually). Install it in the Server mode, it will walk you through most of the configuration. And it's free (beer).

Configure Auto-Save with the network directory you want the files dumped to (unless you want the user to have to choose a location every time). You can also configure Save settings to give it a unique name (lots of other settings too, but these two are the most important IMHO).

Solution 2:

We use PDFCreator here as well, although rather than installing it as a shared printer I have made it part of our standard machine image, partly because it's more convenient for the laptop users.