Batch Printing PDFs

November 2, 2006 11:30 AM

I have been using activePDF Spooler as a COM object to spool multiple PDFs for printing through a web interface to a network printer. The product has been discountinued and is no longer supported. Substitutes, anyone?

FWIW, the interface is written in ColdFusion. Active PDF Spooler has died and they no longer offer support.
The discontinuation notice seems to imply that Adobe's products now do this, but I can not find anything addressing this on Adobe's site.

posted by juggler to technology (7 comments total)

We use Crystal Reports to create the PDF's. Good for reports - Not so good for anything else. You can do some pretty fancy stuff with Crystal like embedding jpegs, etc so it's worth looking into even if you have no definitive data source.

Many of the various PDF printers have an option to print automatically to a numbered PDF file. Win2PDF Pro rings a bell, but it's been so long since I looked at this that I can't remember what was good and what was bad.

If you're smart, you could use the various Ghost Utilities to get what you want. I, unfortunately was not that smart.

... Adds to favourites. I know I will need this again some time in the future
posted by seanyboy at 1:34 PM on November 2, 2006

Also. I don't know what you're creating, but have you considered Flash Paper. If anything is going to be compatible with Cold Fusion, then that is.
posted by seanyboy at 1:37 PM on November 2, 2006

I've had good results with the Aspose PDF components. They're primarily designed for .NET but there are Java versions that you ought to be able to use with CFMX. Their support is exceptional, too.
posted by NeonSurge at 3:07 PM on November 2, 2006

The current version of ColdFusion provides the ability to create PDFs. To do this, it includes a Java library called iText which can do some of this stuff if you invoke it directly.

The next version of ColdFusion will have more PDFy goodness, I'm sure, since it's owned by Adobe.

I would recommend that you avoid using any COM objects with CF, because it's simply not a good COM client. Use Java libraries if you want, those work fine. PDFBox works well for PDF manipulation, if you need to go beyond what iText does.
posted by me & my monkey at 4:46 PM on November 2, 2006

Oh, and I'd avoid the FlashPaper thing. Who knows if it'll even exist a year from now.
posted by me & my monkey at 4:46 PM on November 2, 2006

We're about to roll out a product that incorporates NovaPDF Not sure if would meet your needs, but we think it is pretty nifty as an API to call from C++... maybe they have a COM version?
posted by gregvr at 5:09 PM on November 2, 2006

Thanks for the advice everyone. I am going to check out these options. I will post again later to indicate what I went with.
posted by juggler at 7:21 PM on November 2, 2006