I’ve looked through the documentation and a few threads on here - and it appears that you have the ability to map to a specific input tray on a printer in the output creation print preset. But for some reason, I don’t see any option to do so when I go through the wizard - am I missing something?
Is this because I’m using ‘Generic PDF’ as my model? It’s my only option at the moment, but when I go to ‘Edit Available Printers’, I see the following:
From what I’ve read, it sounds like you’d have to load a printer definition file to get more options, but how does one go about doing that? Is that the right way to go about mapping to an input tray or am I missing something obvious?
I think your printer needs PCL because it is a HP laser printer. So there should be no PPD file (PostScript Printer Definition) for this printer. I dont know how the OL support team could provide you with a PDC file for that printer, because normally you have to send the PPD to OL support and get back a PDC.
If you know the tray names you can choose one of the “Generic PCL” output models. In the next wizard step you can set your trays…
I suppose the issue with outputting in PCL or PS is that I need to be able to easily capture data from this output to use for collating said output with other files. We’ve done this in the past with PDFs and that’s why PDFs are really what I need. I just need a way to choose what tray the PDF output is going to pull from.
Because if the whole PDF goes out the same tray and there is no tray switch in the job, you could add PJL commands at the beginning of the PDF file via the Advanced tab of the Printer Queue Output.
Once the PDFs have been collated, different pages of the PDF need to go to a different input tray. With the old PlanetPress Suite, this is what the purpose of the document selection in the Printer Queue Output was for - it would have different pages that the data would be merged into that had a conditional to determine which page it was (based on a global variable) - in the properties of those pages, in Advanced Paper Handling, would be settings for the Paper Source tray. Given that I can’t seem to get these old documents to work with the merge as I did before, I’m looking for any other way to do this.
Yeah, unfortunately the whole PDF doesn’t go out in the same tray.
If I did have a PPD of our printers and set that up as the Printer Model in the Output Creation, the output would still be in a native printer language, right? So I’d still have the same problem of being able to map it to a tray but not being able to effectively capture data from it and collate with the other data.
Where you are loosing me is that you say you wish to capture data from it and collate with other.
Isn’t the two branch we discussed earleir (1 for PDF output and 1 for printer output) allow you to capture data from the PDF part?
This could possibly work I think if we were only printing one thing in isolation, but there’s several PDF outputs that we have to combine together in a specific way. Brief summary: this whole thing is about our invoice printing process, we print invoices in what we call batches. Batches can have a variable # of invoices, but every batch begins with a unique batch sheet. The invoices that print as part of the batch sometimes have what we call collateral - essentially promotional ads that we send with the invoices to the customer. Not every invoice gets collateral, but some do, and there’s many different kinds of collateral.
So basically we create PDF output for batch sheets, invoices, and collateral, and then near the end of the workflow process, we combine them together (using Send to Folder with the concatenate files checked).
In essence, I guess your suggestion could work if you could concatenate native printer language files (PCL/PS) like PDFs - is that possible? I guess I’ve been working under the assumption that this wouldn’t work properly.
For PCL I can’t answer as it is not one I am familiar with but with Postscript, you would endup with longer printing time as each invoice and collateral would be seen as its own job at the printer.
You could contact our support people to see if they have anything to offer as far as a direction toward a solution for your exact situation. You can do so by opening a ticket via our website. I think what you want to do could be done by loading up any collateral you have (I assume they are as images or PDF) inside the Template dynamically and then have the output preset handle they tray switch.
This is a bigger analysis project than this medium offer so I suggest you first contact our support people to see what they come up.
You can also contact your OL Sales rep to have our team of professional services do it for you.
Of course, other members of this forum can surely advise you with similar poject they did.
