Capturing Prints

Desktop version — coming soon. The features on this page belong to the desktop version of Deste being developed for Windows and Linux, which can’t be downloaded yet. The web version (destepdf.com) takes in documents with Add Files.

The desktop version adds itself to your system as a printer. When you choose Print in any program — Word, a browser, a PDF reader, an accounting program — and pick Deste as the printer, the job doesn’t go to paper: it’s captured as a PDF and lands at the top of the stack in Deste’s window.

Why

• You see it before it’s printed. You weed out unneeded pages such as covers, ads and blank pages before they go to paper.
• You collect jobs from different programs. Capture an invoice from a browser, a report from Word and a table from another program, then print them all at once, in one order.
• It may never go to paper at all. Instead of printing what you captured, you can save it as a single PDF or compress it.

How it works

Deste runs a small capture server in the background that listens only on this computer (IPP — Internet Printing Protocol). The Deste printer added to the system is connected to this server:

• On Windows, the Deste printer is added by an install script and connects to the capture endpoint on localhost.
• On Linux, the printer is added to CUPS as a queue; the capture endpoint listens on a port that needs no special privileges, and administrator permission is asked for only when adding the queue.

A captured job is written as a PDF to a folder on your computer and appears in the window. Nothing goes out to the network or the internet.

Loop protection

Deste never shows its own printer as a target in the list of real printers, so you can’t accidentally print a captured job back to Deste and send it into an endless loop.

What happens to captured documents

Captured documents stay in the list until you delete them or one of the auto-clean settings kicks in. In the desktop version, removed documents move to the History archive on disk and can be brought back from there.