Printing large batches of print jobs is common in many organizations. Examples include:

• Mail-merged newsletters
• Batch invoices and mail-outs
• Student reports during end-of-semester reporting time.

Many of these batch printing applications work by sending a large amount of small individual jobs to the print queue. It is usually desirable for these batch print jobs to print in a predefined order. For example the jobs may be printed in alphabetical order and this order used to match up with a separate batch of printed envelopes.

PaperCut can affect batch printing order under the following situations:

• If an account selection or confirmation popup is enabled.
• If the printer is used in conjunction with a hold/release queue.

Normally a print queue will print jobs in the order they are received, but this logic cannot be applied if a popup or hold/release queue is used. The reason for this is that if a single user failed to acknowledge their popup, they would hold up the queue for other users/jobs. (This is a non-trivial technical problem to solve. The developers have a few ideas on how they can improve this behavior and will be looking at implementing a solution to the out-of-order printing in a future release.)

Solutions

Organizations often employ the following solution:

Set up a separate dedicated print queue for the reporting application. This is often a new queue on the server that points to an existing physical printer. Give the queue a name such as "Batch Printing Queue". Exclude this queue from the popup using one of two methods:

1. Completely disable monitoring on the queue as explained in Chapter 5:
2. Disable the popup on this queue by using the following option on the printer in PaperCut: Override user-level settings -> Do not display account selection popups (Always charge personal account)..

Organizations also often:

• Limit access to the queue so only selected/trusted users can access the special queue. A group filter can be applied via the printer's Filters & Restrictions tab in PaperCut, or the standard sharing permissions of the OS can be used.
• Limit access to the queue by time so it's only available during the period required (for example during school reporting time). This prevents accidental use of the queue for other jobs.
• Set a zero page cost on the printer, or use a dedicated special user account (if it is required that the user is not charged for this type of printing).
• If the queue has been completely removed from PaperCut monitoring and the workstation is running Windows, it may be appropriate to enable to option Print directly to the printer on the Advanced tab of the printer's Properties dialog. This option will ensure that other users/jobs can jump into the queue during batch operations.

Categories: Tips & Tricks, Configuration

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