How to print any file-type? The app he referenced to seems to open application that is set as default for that file-type, calls print, and then close the app. Anyone knows how to do that?
In the general case, this is not possible. However,
you may be able to handle enough of the common file
types to make people happy.
Here are just a couple of the obstacles you will
run into:
- For some file types, nothing knows how to open
the file except the app that created it, which
may not be installed. A good example of this
is Publisher; nothing else can read its files,
and it is usually not installed (even when Office
is installed, Publisher frequently is not), but
it is common enough that people *will* try to
send that format as an email attachment. For
that matter, somebody will try to send some
hyper-obscure file format that is proprietary
to some shareware app nobody ever heard of.
In rare cases, the app needed to open the file
may not even be available for Windows (e.g.,
some popular Mac software).
- If the content-type and the extension do not
agree, it is not always clear which is correct.
A human can use trial and error, because if he
tries to open it in the wrong app it'll "look
like garbage", and he won't hit print. You
may need to employ magic-number checking in
these cases. Joy.
- Some things are not, technically speaking,
sensible to print, but people will want to anyway.
Somebody will get sent a MS-TNEF attachment,
a screen saver, or an EXE, and want to print it.
This is especially true of TNEF, which frequently
does not contain what the message claims it
contains. People freqently try to attach
digital photographs, believe they have done
so, and say in the message what it's a picture
of, when in fact the attachment is 20 bytes and
contains nothing of the kind.
If it were me, I would ask the guy for an exhaustive
list of all the file formats he wants supported,
and I'd evaluate that list *before* agreeing to do it.
It's easy to handle BMP, PNG, JPEG, and GIF, and it's
not hard to pass HTML off to IE, and Office formats
off to Office if it's installed. You can look inside
ZIP files and see if there are any filetypes you know
how to print in there. Plain text of
course is no problem, and attached email messages
you can handle easily enough (recursively, probably).
Find out if that's enough to make him happy.
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."
— Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68