PrintSettings.activePrinter not writeable in JS on Mac and CS4

Question

Somehow I feel this may have come up before, but I can’t find anything, so:
According to »Photoshop CS4 JavaScript Ref.pdf«
app.activeDocument.printSettings.activePrinter
should be read-write, but I fail to be able to change the active printer (Mac OS X 10.5.8 and Photoshop 11.0.1).
Do any of You know if there is a known issue or have an idea what I could be overlooking?

Answer 1

I only got a s far as seeing if this was a possibility and this did work for me here. I set up a bunch of fake IP printers to test (half dozen).
I could then keep changing the index of the printerList array and each time this was the selected printer in the print dialog.
Printing added to the correct spoolers. What I think you may have to do is NOT have last used selected in system prefs.
This requires a little cleaning up as I cheated with the bridgetalk message for now. Don't know why filePath.remove(); is NOT working either will have to look at that too (could use shell rm but don't think I need to). Here is my rough test script…
#target photoshop
// Get current system default printer name
var defaultPrinter = osxGetDefaultPrinter();
// Get list of available system printers
var printerList = osxAvailablePrinters();
// Set system default to choice
osxSetDefaultPrinter(printerList[2]);
function osxGetDefaultPrinter() {
var shellString = "lpstat -d | awk '{print $4}' > ~/Desktop/OSX_Default_Printer.txt";
btMessaging('bridge', shellString);
var filePath = new File('~/Desktop/OSX_Default_Printer.txt');
var defaultPrinter;
filePath.open('r');
while (filePath.tell() < filePath.length) {
var defaultPrinter = filePath.readln();
filePath.close();
filePath.remove();
return defaultPrinter;
function osxAvailablePrinters() {
var shellString = "lpstat -a | awk '{print $1}' > ~/Desktop/OSX_Available_Printers.txt";
btMessaging('bridge', shellString);
var filePath = new File('~/Desktop/OSX_Available_Printers.txt');
var printerList = new Array();
filePath.open('r');
while (filePath.tell() < filePath.length) {
printerList.push(filePath.readln());
filePath.close();
filePath.remove();
return printerList;
function osxSetDefaultPrinter(printerName) {
var shellString = "lpoptions -d " + printerName;
btMessaging('bridge', shellString);
function btMessaging(targetApp, script) {
var bt = new BridgeTalk();
bt.target = targetApp;
bt.body = 'app.system(' + script.toSource() + ');';
//bt.onResult = function(inBT) {}
//bt.onError = function(inBT) {}
bt.send();
Get default printer could be recalled as a test as using bridge system commands don't return anything.