Multifunctional printer control panel
We have 4 printers with identical trays / paper set up in a pool. There may be multiple jobs submitted, and this will be somewhat round-robin to the printers depending on which one is idle. It works well, but .. We are working on a new web based application and creating PDF output files. The dataset could include 3 different print jobs coming out to 3 different trays, but would preferably be able to pick up after just one of the printers has finished. Any suggestions on how to submit 3 print jobs, but does the "set" of jobs have all the queues to just one physical printer? Currently the third party of the buffering is in place, it's old, it's a little shitty,i want to replace it with windows printer pool or some other third party application if you can suggest one that will suggest the control you need.
Thanks.
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The best way to do this is to merge the PDFs before sending them to the printer. This would "set" the PDFs to send in one print job and ensure they are sent to the same printer. This will be compatible with Windows printer pool and will work without a third party spooler application.
One way to combine PDF files is to use the free PDFTK command line toolkit available at: http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/
The cat command can be used to combine PDF files into one PDF for a "set" print job:
pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf
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