Sune Vuorela wrote a post asking people to make sure their private hacks become public. That inspired me to publish Expadirk.
Expadirk is my solution to my accounting software provider requiring me to purchase yet more proprietary software in order to send statements, purchase orders and invoices by email.
The accounting package has a way of outputting print runs as PDF. In order to email them, the user has to set up BroadGun Software’s PDFMachine. PDFMachine provides a virtual printer that processes incoming PDFs, splits them into individual PDFs and emails them off as per instructions embedded within the PDF.
It seemed like a perfect task for a bit of perl. I wrote it about two years ago but never got around to posting it. In that time it has successfully sent thousands of emails including our monthly statement run which is about 200-300 emails.
I installed Expadirk on my linux box as a cups-pdf printer and shared that printer via samba. Then I connected the Windows machines to the shared printer to give them the PDF emailing capability.
I added 2 features not in PDFMachine. Our accounting package had no way of specifying the from email address, so I added a <from></from> tag to the email body. Expadirk will use whatever is in the from tag as the from address if it finds one.
Our accounting package did not have a way to specify that you want to print and email particular documents so I added a <print> tag. If Expadirk finds <print> in the body of the email it will send the PDF to the printer as well and emailing it.
You can find the code on github.
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