ALMA Print Extension (APE) - Easily Print Custom Letters & Notifications

Authors: Alexander Wagner (UB Mannheim)

This is free software. You may use it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See docs/gpl.txt for details.

Parts of the software use different licenses which are listed in file LICENSE.

Summary

Every E-Mail ALMA sends can be printed out by a custom printer within your local network. "Request Letters", "Resource Slips", "Reminders" or other mails that are received by the server are directly forwarded to the APE script.

The APE script parses incoming HTML mails and converts them to PDF. The generated PDF file can be printed out on any user-defined printer.

APE mainly supports two functions:

direct print (prints mail immediately)
queue-controlled print (prints collected mails by cronjob)

APE has a simple and directory based file structure. Configuration changes can easily be made by editing text files.

Additionally APE offers functions like caching mails in a temp directory. It even has a print history, logging mechanisms and a print preview for the best possible transparency.

Hard & Software requirements

APE was built on a Debian server system, but can be installed on any other Windows or Linux system that is able to run an SMTP and web server as well.

The description beneath covers the software requirements of a Linux based environment:

SMTP active and running
Apache2 or similar
PHP5 or higher
PHP Mime Mail Parser
CUPS
wkhtmltopdf

Installation

Mannheim University Library develops and installs APE as a web application on a Linux server running Debian GNU Linux (Jessie). Other hardware and software combinations can also be used, but might require some smaller modifications.

See INSTALL.md for detailed information.

Bug reports

Please file your bug reports to https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/Ape/issues. Make sure that you are using the latest version of the software before sending a report.

Contributing

Bug fixes, new functions, suggestions for new features and other user feedback are appreciated.

The source code is available from https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/Ape. Please prepare your code contributions also on GitHub.

Acknowledgments

This project uses other free software: