Bulk printing under windows xp/2000?

June 8, 2005 8:15 AM

How the heck can I bulk print thousands of mixed documents under Windows 2000?

Ok... so here's my situation: as part of our production workflow, I've got to print about 1,000 documents every day. They're all word or html, sitting in a single directory.

I wrote a ghetto-ass php script that opens the docs using com objects within Word, but that seems to working worse and worse as the load increases.

Anyway, anyone have any tips of printing this type of stuff? Ideally, we'd just use Word, but it seems to get stuck open sometimes -- particularly when I'm printing html docs from word -- and that just backs up the entire queue.

I can't use the standard "select all," right click, then "print" feature either... it just can't handle the rock.

posted by ph00dz to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Good grief, man. A thousand documents a day? I hope you have a good print server and network printer capaple of decent PPMs. I think your solution to queue up the jobs without overloading the server is pretty wise . You can also enable print pooling if you have several printers of the same type.
posted by boo_radley at 9:28 AM on June 8, 2005

AutoPrint.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:48 AM on June 8, 2005

Yeah... we've printed something like 81,000 pages in the last 2 months on our HP. Printer pooling sounds interesting, but we need to keep all this stuff in order to make it match with the shipping labels.

Maybe you're right, in regards to the print server... maybe that's where we should be looking.

Anyway, since I can't cut 'n' paste code into the forum, here's my sample code. Which kinda works...

Still... I like the WCityMike suggestion... it seems like that could work well if I brush up a bit on my VB.
posted by ph00dz at 10:02 AM on June 8, 2005

wcitymike's code will work just for documents that are already open within word. You could polish it up and produce something that will open the document, print it, and close it, but then you're duplicating what you've already got in PHP. I'm not knocking it, but you'll have to have enough resources to keep open your hojillion documents in word. Do you think you've got enough memory to keep them all open at once?

For 80 euros, monju_bosatsu's program looks dead sexy. Far better than the "Get one of these" suggestions the copy/print center guy gave me when I asked him about your question -- slapping his high-volume printer on the side.
posted by boo_radley at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2005