Printing several files of different formats from within asp.net application

Question

We have a business application where users can upload documents and where admins later review them. These admins want to print these documents, preferably by just ticking checkboxes in the file list form and clicking a "print button".

My problem is how to append the different documents, which of course can be of different formats, and send them to a printer in one go. I am currently thinking of converting them into a common format (like xps of pdf, or even good old PostScript) and send that file out. I have not yet found any conversion tools though.

Has anyone had any experience in these matters, and if so, what were your conclusions? Are there any good conversion tools out there, or am I going in the wrong direction?

Answer 1

If the user selects to print multiple documents why do you want to print them as one document, I'd thought it would be better to print them as separate prints one after another so that if the printout breaks or something it might be easier to know which went ok and which ones got stuck etc. And in my experience it seems like it's more likely that printers will go wrong and/or slow when you're printing huge documents.

So all in all I'd suggest that it might be better to leave them as is.

Answer 2

Ho1 you have an excellent point; large documents are for some reason much more error prone in my experience.

Having examined a few different approaches, we have reached the conclusion: We have already provided the customer with a means of downloading the different files as a zip archive, and we advise the customer to acquire a batch printing software that can handle zip archived files.

This gives them what they are looking for, i.e. a (close to) one-click printing solution, without giving us the grief of supporting "ump-teen" different file formats.