Print the Document on Your Kindle - suztomoのはてなダイアリー

These days, electric devices for viewing documents have been common. Amazon Kindle and iPad are typical examples for the devices. We can transfer our PDFs or other documents from my computers to these devices using email or cables. This entry introduces a method to print documents on these devices in the same way as the case of printing on paper

紙に印刷するように，プリンタダイアログで「Kindleに印刷」ってのができるようになりました．これを選択すると数分で自動的にKindleにドキュメントが転送されます．

How it works

Printing documents on Kindle is quite simple. Let's see this screenshot of a printing disalog. You see an interesting option in PDF options.

By selecting the entry "Send AZW to Your Kindle", your kindle gets the document that is converted to Kindle format in few minutes.

Implementation

Normally there is no option "Send AZW to Your Kindle" in your printing dialog. I created the option. Mac OS X provides a interface to manipulate PDF in its printing dialog. Once you create a shell script on the directory "/Library/PDF Services", the name of the shell script appears in the menu of printing dialog.

Here, I put a following shell script to implement the menu in the above.

/Library/PDF Services $ cat Send\ AZW\ to\ Your\ Kindle 
#!/bin/sh
#
#
/usr/bin/python /Users/suztomo/Documents/gmail_python/kindleSender.py "$1" "$3" \
 >> /Users/suztomo/Documents/gmail_python/stdout \
 2> /Users/suztomo/Documents/gmail_python/stderr
rm "$3"

When you select the option in printing dialog, a temporary file path of the document and the document's name are passed to the shell script, where they are sent to kindleSender.py again.

And kindleSender.py sends a mail to my Kindle's mail address given a path name of the temporary PDF file. Documents sent to the mail address are converted to Kindle format and automatically delivered to my Kindle.

#!/usr/bin/python2.6
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import smtplib
from datetime import datetime
from sys import argv
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.application import MIMEApplication
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.header import Header
from email.utils import formatdate

def create_message(from_addr, to_addr, subject, body, encoding, attachmentpath,
				   attachmentname):
    msg = MIMEMultipart()
    msg['Subject'] = Header(subject)
    msg['From'] = from_addr
    msg['To'] = to_addr
    msg['Date'] = formatdate()

    related = MIMEMultipart('related')
    alt = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
    related.attach(alt)

    content = MIMEText(body, 'plain', encoding)
    alt.attach(content)
    fp = file('%s' % attachmentpath, 'rb')
    pdf = MIMEApplication(fp.read(), 'pdf', name=attachmentname)
    pdf.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename=attachmentname+".pdf")
    related.attach(pdf)

    msg.attach(related)
    return msg

def send_via_gmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg):
    s = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)
    s.ehlo()
    s.starttls()
    s.ehlo()
    s.login(from_addr, "password")
    s.sendmail(from_addr, [to_addr], msg.as_string())
    s.close()
    d = datetime.today()
    print "sent a mail %s" % (d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    name = argv[1] if len(argv) == 3 else None
    path = argv[2] if len(argv) == 3 else None
    if not name or not path:
        print "specify file path and name to convert"
        exit()
    print "Received: %s" % (name)
    from_addr = 'your mail@gmail.com'
    to_addr = 'your kindle mail@free.kindle.com'
    title = 'convert'
    body = ''
    msg = create_message(from_addr, to_addr, title, body, 'utf-8', path, name)
    send_via_gmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg)

It takes one or two minutes to get converted documents in my Kindle. Note that the account must be your registered email address to Amazon; otherwise, the email would be ignored.

How it works

Implementation

Reference