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copied!<p>Thanks all for your comments. Unfortunately this "php start printjob" thing was part of a larger project that was cancelled today because of, well... I dont know... political reasons. Guess the project is pretty much dead.</p> <p>Anyway, I tried myself a few more times in the last days and could not get it to work with IIS. My solution that I implemented and tested already: remove IIS, install a XAMPP or WAMPP package with a local apache and PHP that runs with <em>admin access rights</em>. </p> <p>This did the trick. I used <code>pclose(popen('...command...', 'r'));</code> in PHP in order to start the <code>.exe</code> and so that PHP does not wait until the PDF is finished. It all worked great. </p> <p>Here is my C# code which starts the print job using Acrobat Reader</p> <pre><code>public void Print(string pathname, string acrobatDirectory) { var proc = new Process { StartInfo = { Arguments = String.Format("/t \"{0}\"", pathname), FileName = acrobatDirectory, UseShellExecute = false, CreateNoWindow = true, RedirectStandardOutput = false, RedirectStandardError = false, } }; proc.Start(); } </code></pre> <p>The first argument is the path to the PDF that should be printed, the second parameter is the absolute path to the <code>AcroRd32.exe</code>.</p> <p>The only problem left was that <code>AcroRd32.exe</code> was started, printed and never got closed again. So every printjob started a new instance of <code>AcroRd32.exe</code> (I am using Acrobat Reader 9.0). So if you printed 10 times, 10 acrobat reader instances were created.</p> <p>What I did was starting the print job, then waiting X seconds, hoping that the printer was finished and then killing all <code>AcroRd32.exe</code> instances:</p> <pre><code>public void Print(string pathname, string acrobatDirectory) { Debug.WriteLine("Printing..."); Printer.Print(pathname, acrobatDirectory); Thread.Sleep(30000); try { Debug.WriteLine("Trying to kill runnung AcroRd32.exe's "); FindAndKillProcess("AcroRd32"); } catch (Exception) { Debug.WriteLine("AcroRd32.exe could not be killed..."); } } private bool FindAndKillProcess(string name) { foreach (Process clsProcess in Process.GetProcesses()) { if (clsProcess.ProcessName.StartsWith(name)) { clsProcess.Kill(); return true; } } return false; } </code></pre> <p>This worked out quite well.</p> <hr /> <p>Note that the above (killing all <code>AcroRd32.exe</code> and running PHP with admin privilegs) was only doable because: <strong>The whole thing is only used by one user at a time and has a very limited area of use</strong>.</p> <p>It should be used on a touchscreen application deployed at the clients POS. A salesman would use the PHP app in order to configure a product, and then PHP would call my .exe which would create and print a PDF in the background. The printed document is then handed to the client. <strong>So security etc. was not really a concern in this case.</strong></p> <hr /> <p><strong>If anyone has a solution in order to use it with IIS, I am still willing to accept it as an answer.</strong></p>

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