Printing Multiple PDFs from Java as a single print job (physical printing)

Question

I would like to print multiple pdfs from java (using the java print service) in a single print job.

I would like to send multiple pdfs as a single job to the printer. This is so that all the documents in my 'batch' print together and are not interleaved with someone else's print jobs when I go pick them up from the printer.

A batch potentially consists of 1000s of print jobs.

I tried jpedal, but it does not support java.awt.print.Book

        Book book = new Book();
        PdfDecoder pdfDecoder = readFileApplyOptions("C:/Temp/singlepagetest.pdf", pageFormat);
        book.append(pdfDecoder, pageFormat);

        PdfDecoder pdfDecoderTwo = readFileApplyOptions("C:/Temp/printfax-test.pdf",pageFormat);
        book.append(pdfDecoderTwo, pageFormat);

        printJob.setPageable(book);
        printJob.print();

only prints out the first pdf. How do I print multiple pdfs in a single job?

readFileAndApplyOptions() basically creates a new PdfDecoder object and returns it.

I also tried Sun's PDFRenderer PDFRenderer in a similar fashion (using the Book object), but my code still only prints out the first page only.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue before? Is there a solution I might be missing?

Answer 1

AFAIK, you can't, multiple documents will be printed in multiple jobs.

A workaround could be join all the pdf into a single document and print them.

:-/

Answer 2

Not Java specific, but I've experience of this one in C#. I solved it by printing each document to a file (programmatically equivalent to checking the "PrintToFile" checkbox on a print dialog), then concatenated each file into a memory stream, which I passed to the Win32 API printer spool in raw format (since the output to file was already correctly formatted by default).

You might be able to use a similar technique in Java

Answer 3

Hi NiceGuyUK,

Could you please provide a sample of your code? I'm looking to do something similar. I have a folder with multiple pdf files and I'd like to send them to the printer as one job so that they are printed uninterupted. Your solution sounds ideal.

Answer 4

You should merge all of your pdf documents in one document using iText library and then print the merged document page by page.

see Print a PDF Document in Java