Printing multiple copies to mulitple trays | Porn Fan Community Forum

Reviewers Recommend

So Extra

So Extra - review by Sean DPS
Director: Mike Quasar
Starring: Tommy Pistol, Ryan Keely, Seth Gamble, Isiah Maxwell, Robby Apples, Kay Lovely, Melissa Stratton, Chanel Camryn. Read review

Participate...

log in
register

Browse...

Etiquette
Active Topics
Popular Topics
Member List
Search

All Forums > Tech Talk > Tech Talk Forum Page 28 > Printing multiple copies to mulitple trays

Author	Post
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 14 2008 : 11:19PM I realize this is an obscure and esoteric problem / question, but who knows? It might be easy peasy! Say you want to print five copies of something, but you want each copy to come from a different paper tray loaded with different color paper. You press print, and one copy comes from tray 1, the second from tray 2, and so on. How? [Link]
Leyden Senior Member The people have spoken. I'm a nitpicking dick. Woo! 8751 Posts 1/04	Posted - Mar 14 2008 : 11:27PM I would just alternate paper colors in the same tray. [Link]
ma meeshka Iconoclastic Member 3939 Posts 4/06	Posted - Mar 14 2008 : 11:29PM press print three times, each time assigning it to a different printer. no? [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 2:37PM Leyden wrote: I would just alternate paper colors in the same tray. Click to expand Then you have to buy paper presorted this way, which is possible but expensive, or have someone do it manually. You also can not count on each print job being the same number of pages, which wreaks havoc with the pattern. Thank you for responding. [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 2:49PM ma meeshka wrote: press print three times, each time assigning it to a different printer. no? Click to expand We are talking about sales people who want the process to be fast and automated. They do not want to press print, choose a tray, then press print again, then choose a different tray, five times for each order. Each copy of an order could be more than one page, too, as noted above. My first thought is a macro, but it seems crude. I wonder if the magic is not somehow in the driver. Somehow the printer can be told "when you receive a print job, print each page of it to each of five paper trays". I have a suspicion that the answer lies in PCL programming, that somehow I will need to append the proper codes to achieve the preceding process flow through the print job itself. If I'm missing something simpler, though, I prefer the parsimonious solution wherever possible. [Link]

Jeff @ IAFD Webmaster IAFD.COM 931 Posts 6/00	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 4:12PM What are these orders being processed in? Custom program? Word? Excel? That might be a key to the solution. [Link]
Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 4:13PM There are companies that will sell you multi-colored paper pre-collated for just this purpose. Here's one that sells two and three colored reams for multi-color forms. However, I'm sure that there are others who sell paper for 4, 5 or 6 color forms. [Link]
Drew Black broken crankshaft 8009 Posts 9/99	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 4:55PM cobalt60 wrote: I have a suspicion that the answer lies in PCL programming, that somehow I will need to append the proper codes to achieve the preceding process flow through the print job itself. If I'm missing something simpler, though, I prefer the parsimonious solution wherever possible. Click to expand I think you're on the right track. You'll most likely need to code the print job manually. I suspect there's a "standard" API for it. Have you tried MSDN? [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 5:39PM Jeff: it's a monolithic ERP package. I loathe the thing. I've been in touch with the consultants but I haven't heard back yet. A lot of the time, they want you to do 90% of the work and then bill you for it. Bill: agreed. They only want NCR on the second page, though. They want regular paper, then 2-part NCR, followed by regular paper. At least, that's the most cost-effective. That pre-collated NCR gets pricey, quick. Right now, they print on tractor-feed multi-part pre-printed forms with carbon pages in between and it's around 0.11 per page. Some of this other paper is double to quadruple that per order printed. I have told them time and again that they need to type the notes in the NOTES FIELDS so that they PRINT on the FORM, and they wouldn't need NCR at all, to no avail. They want to be able to write on them, and it to come through to the second copy (but not the rest). I can only suggest so far. When I'm told "this is how we're going to do it no matter what you say, computer boy", then I shrug my shoulders and walk away. Drew: no, I haven't checked MSDN yet. I've never tried to hack a custom print driver before, so it should be interesting. I'll let you know what I come up with. Thanks for putting a brain cell on this with me, folks. I appreciate the comments so far. [Link]
Drew Black broken crankshaft 8009 Posts 9/99	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 6:06PM Do you have access to the code that builds the print job? Looking through MSDN it should be pretty straightforward to select the input bin. It's similar for VB6 and .NET. In VB6 you'll be looking for the printer object and the printers collection. The printer drivers expose their properties through an abstracted Printer namespace. I doubt you'll have to write PCL code to accomplish your task. I do think you might have to issue multiple print jobs, one for each tray. I think the papersource needs to be set prior to sending the data for the document to the spooler. I don't think you can change paper sources mid document. It might have something to do with error reporting. It won't know which page/bin to reprint in the event of a jam or empty bin. [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 15 2008 : 7:11PM Logically, I follow. I've written some stuff that works with bar code label printers in the past using similar techniques. But no, unfortunately, it's closed source compiled code and so I will only be able to manipulate the print job after the fact. I'm favoring creating a "file" printer object to accept the initial print job, then a simple loop to replicate the job four times, each time doing like you indicated and setting the output tray property and appending the resulting output to itself. The final printer file could then be piped to the actual output device. I'm going to harangue the HP people Monday and see if shaking that tree yields any fruit, too. Can't hurt! [Link]
K Smitten Kitten Cloud 9 530 Posts 2/06	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 4:32AM cobalt60 wrote: I'm favoring creating a "file" printer object to accept the initial print job, then a simple loop to replicate the job four times, Click to expand I'd look into going that route too, if it needs to be done locally. You might also want to whip out the Windows DDK, and write your own intermediate driver. Perhaps buy a commercial driver with source, and tweak that. Is the print server running a proper OS? If it is, I'd definitely try looking into modifying the print job on there. The older PCL versions were very easy to write for. Dunno if the more recent ones have been "improved" too much. Would it be OK if all print jobs to that printer behaved this way? [Link]
ma meeshka Iconoclastic Member 3939 Posts 4/06	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 6:26AM cobalt60 wrote: We are talking about sales people who want the process to be fast and automated. Click to expand ahh, well, i didn't know that. [Link]
K Smitten Kitten Cloud 9 530 Posts 2/06	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 7:49AM ma meeshka wrote: cobalt60 wrote: We are talking about sales people who want the process to be fast and automated. Click to expand ahh, well, i didn't know that. Click to expand Sales "people". The lot of them should pay a visit to your avatar, meeshka. [Link]
Hardware All-Star Member Your other left 14594 Posts 3/02	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 8:24AM It's their world and welcome to it. [Link]

Drew Black broken crankshaft 8009 Posts 9/99	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 12:40PM If you have to take a man-in-the-middle approach to handling the print job you should be able to create a VBscript job that polls the directory where the files are dumped and then route those to the appropriate network printers. Each copy could be routed to a print tray or even to a separate printer elsewhere on the network. [Link]
DrP0rn0 Senior Member 1836 Posts 5/04	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 9:53PM I worked in a retail environment where we had this requirement. The package we were using could be configured to send each individual page of the print job X number of times. We set it up to print each page 3 times. We then loaded the laser printer tray with 3 colors of paper, manually collated as white, red, green, white, red, green... It was a huge waste of time to sort it, but our print volume was low, so it worked for us. Sounds like your problem is different though, as the package is sending the print job as a whole one time and one time only. PCL indeed controls the print tray and number of copies, but I'm unaware of a way to make a printer alternate trays and print multiple copies. A print server based solution would seem to be the most elegant. In a Unix or Linux based system, it should be rather straight forward (but non-trivial) to write a front end for a printer definition that will send the job five times, each printing to a different tray. Those must be some monster printers to have 5 individual trays. I found a forum posting asking a very similar question, with a link to some German software that appears to be able to do exactly what you want. Read the posting here: http://forum.soft32.com/windows/Print-multiple-copies-trays-ftopict359693.html Let us know what you come up with. Dr. P [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 10:17PM Thanks, Doc. Guys. I'll try PrintMulti tomorrow and go from there. Lots of ideas if that doesn't work out! Thanks again, everybody, for helping a knuckle-dragging redneck out. [Link]
threesomebody Official BlowBang Judge Would you like my autograph? 2491 Posts 12/04	Posted - Mar 16 2008 : 10:20PM Just 'cause I feel like it after reading all this... [Link]
ma meeshka Iconoclastic Member 3939 Posts 4/06	Posted - Mar 17 2008 : 1:24AM K wrote: ma meeshka wrote: cobalt60 wrote: We are talking about sales people who want the process to be fast and automated. Click to expand ahh, well, i didn't know that. Click to expand Sales "people". The lot of them should pay a visit to your avatar, meeshka. Click to expand there's a hole in the world like a great black pit and it's filled with people who are filled with shit and the vermin of the world inhabit it... but not for long... [Link]
DrP0rn0 Senior Member 1836 Posts 5/04	Posted - Mar 27 2008 : 10:21AM Well Cobalt? What happened? Did any of these ideas work? Dr. P [Link]
cobalt60 Knuckle Dragger 2046 Posts 2/03	Posted - Mar 27 2008 : 4:46PM I am ordering a printer with extra trays today. I have downloaded the PrintMulti application and it looks like fun! I have had to contact the 3rd party consultants about whether the ERP package can send multiple jobs from saving a single order. All the plates are spinning. Let's watch! In the meantime, what I was told needed to be done on in a month so we didn't have to order more pre-printed forms turned out to be false because we had already ordered six months worth of said forms. So there is no longer any deadline. So, I'm moving on to other things, like dicking off. But thanks for asking! It may be a while before this thread gets updated, tho'... [Link]
DrP0rn0 Senior Member 1836 Posts 5/04	Posted - Mar 28 2008 : 7:25PM Cool; thanks for the update. Best of luck on this. Dr. P [Link]

All Forums > Tech Talk > Tech Talk Forum Page 28Printing multiple copies to mulitple trays

Previous topic: Devilsfilm.com's address? (topic moved)
Next topic: Tom's Hardware: Best Graphics Cards -- March 2008

Link to this post

Use the code below to link to this topic or a specific post.

URL of this thread

Link to this post with HTML

Link to this post with Forum Code