Can I print multiple documents at once?

July 13, 2005 9:33 AM

Is there any way to select and print, say, 30 documents at a time without having to individually open each one?
posted by BuddhaInABucket to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Yes, select them in explorer, right click and choose "print".
posted by duck at 9:36 AM on July 13, 2005

Are you running XP? I can right click on a selection of several documents and select the Print command to, ah, print them all.

It seems to spawn several copies of Word, but I think it does so in series so it shouldn't be a problem; and anyway, it closes them when it's done.
posted by metaculpa at 9:36 AM on July 13, 2005

If you use PC and the documents are all in the same folder, just highlight them, and then click File Print. It will open each one, print it, then close it. You can highlight a string of them by clicking on first one then holding Shift and clicking on last one. Or you can hold Ctrl and individually select all of the items you want to print. Be careful, if you pick something with a million pages you may clog up the printer for awhile.
posted by jdstef at 9:40 AM on July 13, 2005

If you're using a mac, you can just make a desktop or dock printer and drag them directly into it. That should work.
posted by luriete at 10:08 AM on July 13, 2005

It's a bit more than 30, but you might find this previous discussion useful if your computer gets bogged down by window's file print method.
posted by boo_radley at 10:09 AM on July 13, 2005

lpr *.ps
posted by andrew cooke at 10:15 AM on July 13, 2005

oh, sorry - didn't read the tags.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:16 AM on July 13, 2005

Save a tree, use double-sided printing if you can. :)
posted by catkins at 10:19 AM on July 13, 2005

I would exercise a bit of caution with the multiple selection and print from Windows Explorer method. In my experience, MS Word is pretty reliable if the file sizes are small-to-medium, but, as mentioned previously, you can bog down things to the point that Word will hang if you send big files or if you send too many files.

Some applications don't appear to support this sort of batch printing. Adobe Acrobat is notoriously problematic. It seems to work, but then you notice that it actually didn't queue and print everything.
posted by nobodyyouknow at 10:23 AM on July 13, 2005

I second nobodyyouknow. I've always found that selecting multiple items and using the right-click print option only works with relativily small sized files and small numbers of selected files (less than 10).

Anything bigger generally starts to cause problems, be it from some documents not printing right up to a full on Windows lock-up. Of course, your mileage may vary.
posted by ralawrence at 10:45 AM on July 13, 2005

The select all and right click for the print command works best for me.

I've found that is best to have whatever the native application is open before you hit the print command that way XP won't open and close the program for each individual file... it will only open and close the file.

Also be careful if the files need to be printed in a particular order.
posted by mhaw at 11:19 AM on July 13, 2005

I had to do this the other day to convert hundreds of Quark documents to PDF files... it was ridiculous. Sometimes Quark would open up three documents in a row, sometimes fifteen... sometimes one. I had to babysit the whole operation for a few hours... stupid and horrible.
posted by prostyle at 2:08 PM on July 13, 2005