"How can I easily print multiple PDF documents?"

By Rowan Hanna
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 19 for 2005

Not long ago, it was all the rage to strive towards the ideal of a "Paperless office:" email memorandums, PDF-based document review processes, advances in legislation allowing for valid electronic filing of legal documents, you name it. While we have certainly come a long way, the readability of even high-end screens still lags behind that of paper, so we aren't likely to see a totally paperless office for some time to come.

With that in mind, people still need to print. In some cases, they need to print a lot. Printing many copies of a single document is relatively easy, but what if you need to print copies of a dozen documents? What about a hundred? Do I hear a thousand? More? As you can see, while Adobe Reader's 'Print' dialog is both simple and intuitive, it can be enormously impractical when it would mean opening and configuring it hundreds or thousands of times to print a large collection of documents.

That's where the batch-printing tools come in handy. SilentPrint PDF and PDF Multi Print both call Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader to allow "silent printing" and watched folder automation. For the initiated, "silent printing" is the printing of PDF documents while suppressing the 'Print' dialog -- potentially a huge timesaver, when dealing with large document collections.

On the other hand, perhaps you want to build PDF batch-printing functionality into your own applications? No problem -- just use the XpdfPrint developer component!

Watch this space! Until next time, please browse PDF Store's PDF Prepress & PDF Print aisle for the complete range of PDF printing tools.