Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

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Timelord
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Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by Timelord »

I have a customer who creates very large print jobs and sends them to a power printer. These are image statements from a bank. Sometimes they have an issue once the print has been going for a while and need to stop the print job and then start it up again. The problem is all the wasted paper and toner if they start from the beginning. Does anyone know of a tool that can be used to start the print job further on? The statements are generated using the print driver for the printer so it needs to be able to work with that. I am not necessarily looking for a free tool but that would be best. If there is a cost I am sure the customer will be ok with that too.

Thanks
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HansV
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by HansV »

Many applications let you specify which pages you want to print, for example in Word:
S1925.png
Does the application that generates/prints the bank statements have such a feature? If not, you're probably out of luck.
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John Gray
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by John Gray »

Do they have a second printer, in case of the failure of the first printer?
This doesn't solve your immediate problem, but if the print job is that important, then a backup should be considered...

In the days of mainframes, the printer spooling system would have handled this problem quite neatly.
Progress, eh?!
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Leif
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by Leif »

Could you print to pdf? It means someone then has to (re-)print the resulting file, but that may be a lot more manageable.
And you could potentially half the printing time - print pages 1 to n/2 to hardware printer #1, and simultaneously pages (n/2+1) to n to the second printer John thinks you need :grin:
Leif

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Timelord
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by Timelord »

I am sorry, I was unclear. They are going to be sending the print spool to a file first and then sending it to the printer. They would need something that allows them to browse the file and select a point to print from. Thanks
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Jay Freedman
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by Jay Freedman »

A spooler file is generally readable/understandable only by the printer's firmware -- it's a binary format specific to the printer model. You'd need to have enough documentation of the printer's innards to allow someone to write a custom application to convert it to a displayable format. The only exception I know of is a printer that directly accepts PostScript.

Also, if there's any kind of file header at the beginning of the spooler file that does some kind of setup before the actual print data, there wouldn't be any way to point to some offset in the middle of the file and say "print from here"; the header would have to be retransmitted first.

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Timelord
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Re: Looking for a tool to start print jobs in the middle

Post by Timelord »

Yeah, I knew the file is generally not readable but I was still hopeful. Thanks for the thoughts everyone.
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