How to print PDF with a specific printer

[lorenzwagner]

Hello, I have the following problem/question. How can I print a PDF (not opened but location known) via an action phase? I have a list of printers, whereby I have information about the printers in a collection stage. How can I implement this and what information about the printers do I need in order to be able to select them specifically?

[GeoffHirst]

Hi,

This is moving beyond simple printing. For this you would need to open the PDF and physically access its contents. This isn't likely to be something available for free, I know the Adobe PDF services offer this but you would need to subscribe to it. We do have assets that work with these Adobe services. However, in order to actually action this you would have a number of documents, possibly held in a collection that contains the paths to the documents that you wish to print. This collection would drive the loop which would contain a number of pdf pathnames and as such have decisions that would be met after examining each document. From there you would just select the required printer, based on the criteria you have defined in the condition. It would be a case of setting a text data item to the name of the printer you wanted to use. The complexity here is actually opening the document and finding your criteria from which you would select the printer. The actual printing is now quite simple.

I hope this explains, roughly, what would be needed.

regards

[lorenzwagner]

@GeoffHirst I see, well actually we already implemented that logik to identify the text in the pdf. Lets say we temporarily saved this number in a data-item. We now check with a caluclation stage wheter this number is equal to "123". assuming it is not, we then check if it is "456". We found that it is, and have a data-item "Is 456?" with a Yes Flag. How do i get yout process to use the second row in the newly created collection stage to use the seond printer? Using Col.Printer Name.Row(2) as the input for printing didnt work.

[GeoffHirst]

Hi @lorenzwagner ,

You might need to take a look at the Collection Manipulation asset. This has the ability to locate a specific value dependent on a row ID. I would say that this will be a kind of 'hard coding' because the row ID of a printer, may change if you add or remove printers from the system. Just bear this in mind.

I hope this helps you take your solution forward.

regards