I would appreciate some help with a particular topic.

I would like my application to print a randomly generated text over and over (not from a file) while the program is running, without opening a dialog window.

To those who might respond, thanks for saving my life.

Thanks for writing, Scott. I see that my first posting was not clear. I can generate the random text that I need. But I want to send the text to a physical printer (ie., not print to the screen). My ideal is that while some animation is running on the computer screen, the text will be printed simultaneously on a (preferably dot-mtarix) printer. The text itself is not to be displayed on the screen at all.
My aim is to print sequences of characters incessantly on a piece of paper without displaying those characters on the screen, without showing a printer dialog for the user to choose a printer, etc.
Sorry that this was not clear in my first posting.
I have looked at Java materials, but most of the examples depend on java.awt and are over-complicated for my purposes. Perhaps there is no way around that, but any pointers would be much appreciated.

printing on a dot matrix printer will depend on your printer.. usually it would be a case of using the serial library to talk directly to it and send commands for the printing.

Hi,

I am having a slight problem with printing at the moment! I am tying to do something similar to what hector is doing..sending text to a printer from processing that is not being displayed on screen. I am wondering Hector did you find a solution to this?

Or is it possible to send a section of the screen to be printed rather than a full screen grab? Or even a save a section of the screen to a pdf?

Any advice on this or any information about printing using processing would be greatly appreciated.

Daniel, I couldn't find the original AppleScript, but it's easy enough to recreate.  Open up Automator (in your Applications folder) and make a new script using the "Print Finder items" action.  Then I think you save it as a script, and drop it in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/.  Then right-click the folder where your sketch will export its PDFs, and choose "Enable folder actions".  Somewhere in there, you indicate which script to run, and then anytime a new file "appears" in that folder, it will get handled by your script (which will print it).

Good luck!

This question is for Scott (or anyone else who might know who to do this!)---Scott, I have a problem pretty much identical to TD's---I want to have a processing animation running in the gallery and viewers can click the mouse and print out the resulting pdf on the spot. All the within-processing stuff is working fine, but now I need to get the file to go automatically to the printer with no further user input. Your script sounds just right, BUT...
When I saved the script in the "Print Finder Items" action, it did not give me the option for a script extension---only "workflow" and "application". I tried just saving it as workflow anyway, but didn't work. All the other things in the "Folder Action Scripts" folder have script extensions.
Any ideas MUCH appreciated! BTW, I'm running Mac OS X 5.7

Hey Scott---thanks so much for the reply. I have done as you suggested, but alas, no result yet. Apologies for woeful ignorance here---here's what I've done so far:

I saved the script (which contains only "Print Finder Items"---is that all it needs?); the system dumps it automatically in Library/Workflow/Applications in my home folder; then I went to the folder where I want the action to take place and enabled Folder Actions. Then I right-clicked again on my folder and then on "More" and then on "Configure Folder Actions." Then I got a little window labeled "Folder Actions Setup." On the left-had side of the window, I added (under "Folders with Actions") both the folder where the action should happen and the "Folder Action" folder. On the right-hand side, there then appeared the name of the script that should be used. (On both sides I checked the "on" box.)

Clearly, something is screwed up somewhere. Any ideas? Many thanks in advance. You actually had this thing working, right? I am envious...

Yup---I get that far. And, in fact, there may be progress---this time when I keypressed to save a file from my animation, I saw the little Automator robot appear briefly on my toolbar. That seems like a good sign. But then no action from the printer. I checked to make sure that (a) the printer was on, and (b) there really was a new saved file in my directory. Yes and yes.