Batch File Printing

Question

I have a user that has to print out about 220 documents averaging 2-3 pages each. When printed using the standard Windows method of Select All - Right-click - Print it overwhelms either the print server or the printer itself. I am looking for a utility that will allow me to process say 5 documents at a time that will do all of the documents in a given directory. I am hoping this will alleviate strain on the print server and will also allow the user to not have to babysit his print jobs. I found one that lets you schedule a print job for a certain time, but (and maybe this isn't a deal breaker) the spelling in the program is atrocious.

Answer 1

You could Try DarkStorm's batch print handler Its Free! :-)

DarkStorm's batch print handler is a .Net application that will batch print documents. DarkStorm's batch print handler automates Word/Excel and Adobe Reader to help the batch printing process, also provides support for some popular image formats.
I Haven't been able to test it though

Alternatively:

You could write a simple script that takes names from a text file and prints them at certain intervals. You could query the contents of the print folder to get the document names, put them in a text file and then loop through the text file with a wait inbetween until all documents are printed.

Pseudo Code would look something like this.

Populate Text File Function ()  
{  
  Set Folder Path  
  Get Document Names in folder  
  Write Document Names to Text File  
}  
Print Function  
{  
  While Not End of File{  
  Get Document Name  
  Print Document Name  
  Move down 1 line  
      Wait a timed interval  
 }  
}

My coding isn;t what it used to be so I may have missed a few bits but I think its reasonably there. I would reccomend Guys Scripting Enzine to scour for code samples. You should be able to cut and paste most of the code you need.

Answer 2

This is a job for the command line.

With Cygwin, the following script (which you can type on a bash command line) will print every PDF file in the current directory, one every 5 seconds.

for x in *.pdf; do cygstart -p -- "$x"; sleep 5; done

If you don't want to install Cygwin (which is useful for many other things), see Sathya's answer for a cmd way (it's a little less straightforward). The choice tool would be Powershell, which surely has all the required building blocks (but I don't speak Powershell).

Answer 3

If you really want to go the command line way, copy paste this in a batch file, and change the path and do add the full path to AcroRd32.exe

cd\path\to\pdf\files
for %%f in ("*.pdf") do AcroRd32.exe /t %%f "\\servername\printername" & ping localhost -n 6 >NUL

This will change the directory to the one containing PDF files, start Acrobat Reader in silent mode, print them, and wait for 5 seconds. Another alternative if the printer is shared is

cd\path\to\pdf\files
for %%f in ("*.pdf") do copy %%f "\\servername\printername" & ping localhost -n 6 >NUL

Which does the same, but in my past experience I haven't got good results with this approach - but it's because of the PDF files not having the fonts embedded in them.

Answer 4

A great batch printing application I use all the time is SilentPrint. You can find out more about it at http://www.silentprint.com. I hope you find it as useful as I have.