Duplex printing

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sam D
  • Start date Start date
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Sam D

Hi and thanks in anticipation!

I'm currently working on an upgrade of a school reporting system. A number
of schools wish to print the final reports back to back (duplex) and stapled
on their large photocopiers. The print job could contain in excess of 1500
individual student reports where each has a variable number of pages
(usually between 7 and 13) pages. Massive number of total pages, possibly
15000+!

My thoughts are...

1. Print each student report separately as an individual print job then the
duplexing/stapling should be fine. However this means 1500+ print jobs, and
they'll all have the same name.
Questions:
(A) Is there a way to change the name of each print job to sometihng that
includes the student's name so the user sees more meaningful info on the
printer's screen?
(B) I normally preview reports first. Users love to check everything looks
OK before they print. Can't see how previewing more than one report can be
achieved. Any ideas?

2. Most of the printers use PCL drivers. So I should be able to send the
complete job with the appropriate duplex/staple ESCape codes between each
individual student report. This is my preferred option, however...
(A) How do I send ESCape codes to the printer from within an Access report?
(B) If I can accomplish (A) then will this stuff up the preview?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sam
 
Sam:

1.) There's no way to send escapes to a printer from within an Access
report. Access controls the data sent through the spooler to the print
driver, and there's simply no way to "intersperse" escapes with output.
Many have tried but its just not practical to do since Access 2 and Windows
3.1.

2.) You can change the name of the reports title bar easily for each student
when the report is previewed, however, when printing, there's no way to
change the name of the job in the print spooler; it will always be the name
of the report. To change the title bar in preview, simply add code like
Me.Caption = Me!StudentName in the On Print Event of the student group
header (note however that this only works on a forward paging basis if you
go back through the report the title bar isn't refreshed because the Print
event only occurs once when you page forward.)

3.) About the only other way to do what you want to do, is to output all the
reports to intermeditate files (e.g. PDF files) and then send each of those
to print individually; you could obviously name each file as its created
with the unique file name for the student (which also allows an archive to
be created should they want that with each file.) If you're interested in
looking at that option, you might take a look at our PDF and Mail Library
for Access (PDF Pro or Pro Plus editions) which can automate output of a PDF
file per student and also send the PDF to print, provided that Adobe Acrobat
is installed.
 
Thanks heaps for your response. Your comments confirm my many hours of
searching/reading/mucking around/etc!

At present i've just added a duplex checkbox to my home grown print
dialogue. I use the state of this box to add page breaks to all student
reports with an odd number of pages. Works great for duplexing, but means
schools can't do auto stapling. It was just taking too much of my time, and
was getting unreasonable to charge them (hourly rate for this job).

I'll check out your PDF idea and utility. I've thought of PDFs for the final
archive many times, but have never implemented it. Such a system would also
remove the irritating need to continually upgrade old versions of my BE as
they are opened.

Sam
 
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