Automatic printing of PDF files is one of the most common tasks for Print Conductor. This article is based on customers' requests addressed to our support service.
A Smart Approach to Using Print Conductor Software
Print Conductor allows printing PDF files in batch mode. In most cases, printing works fast and does not require any human intervention or changes in default settings. The latter ones may be required though in case there is a necessity to print a specific range of pages, to avoid printing PDF annotation, to print several sets of documents or to print password protected PDF files.
If changes need to be introduced, they are all available at the settings panel. Just click on Settings on the Print Conductor toolbar to open it.
Another way of introducing changes is via the Print Conductor INI-file. To open it just click Ctrl+Alt+i hotkey. For example, to skip PDF annotations printing, simply change Pdf_PrintAnnotations INI-file variable value to 0.
One more commonly used variable is SrcPageCount. In case you change this value to 1 and restart Print Conductor, every file on the list will display the number of pages it contains for your convenience.
To batch print password protected PDF files, simply add this string to the end of [General] section:
SrcPwd="password value"
Sometimes the users need to increase the speed of printing PDF files. This may be achieved by using Adobe Acrobat public API. Just add the string you can see below to the end of [General] section of Print Conductor INI-file and see how the printing performance will change:
SetExt_1="pdf","acrobat","int"
It goes without saying that Adobe Acrobat Professional or Standard should be installed and activated on the computer so that Print Conductor could use Adobe Acrobat API for printing automation.
2Printer Command Line Tool for Automatic Printing of PDF Files
2Printer is similar to Print Conductor in its capabilities, but is based on the command line interface. 2Printer used by IT professionals and software developers for workflow automation scripts and self-made applications source codes as a documents and image files printing components.
2Printer has INI-file with the same variables. To open 2Printer INI-file, just call this command line:
2Printer.exe -ini
List of most common INI-file variables
Pict_Mode describes scaling mode for PDF and image files. By default its value is 0, which means the "best fit" mode usage. Change this value to 1 to use "fit to page" mode or to 2 to use "print as is" mode.
Pict_AutoRotate default value is 1. You can change it to 0 to skip PDF and image files autorotation to fit them to the paper sheet.
Pdf_PrintAnnotations = 1 by default. You can change it to 0 if you want.
SrcPageCount default value is 0. You can change it to 1 to show document pages number in Print Conductor's list. This change of settings requires restart of Print Conductor.
PrintAsImage default value is 0. You can change it to 1 to convert PDF documents to image files before printing.
UniqueList default value is 1. Simply change it to 0 in case you need to add the same documents to the list several times.
Excel_WorksheetsRange default value is all. You can change it to default to print only actual worksheet from Microsoft Excel XLS and XLSX files.