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My wife wants to convert some files on her laptop to PDF, however, the access controls on her laptop don't allow her to install any software (even a virtual print driver).

Is there some software I could install on my personal laptop to provide a pseudo-printer over the network, so she could connect to that to print to PDF?

I'm on OSX (wife's work laptop is not).

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CUPS-PDF sets up a CUPS printer that produces a PDF file. Setting it up will require several steps:

  • Install it on your Mac. This should be easy since CUPS is the native printing system on the Mac. In fact, maybe it's natively available on the Mac.

  • Arrange for the PDF output to be available. By default, the file will be in a directory somewhere. You'll have to export this directory through Samba or a web server.

  • Set up a network printer on the Windows laptop.

    • If that's not possible due to the access controls, an alternative route is for your wife to upload the files she wants to print to the Mac, and do the PDF conversion there. This will however make printing a lot less seamless, and require the corresponding software to be installed on the Mac (e.g. Word if she wants to print Word files, etc).

  • Arrange for the PDF files to be retrievable on the Windows machine. The easiest setup would be to mount a Samba share, but again the access controls might hinder you.

This experience report may have helpful advice.

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Not exactly what you asked for, but there are sites that let you upload a file and then email you back a pdf file. See here and here for two examples picked at random. If there are just a few files involved and security is not an overriding issue, this might be an easier solution.

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