Print Distributor 5.0.3039

Easily create virtual printers to manage the output from any application. Install on client PC's running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 or centrally on a server running Windows Server 2003 or 2008.

Print Distributor lets you write your raw print files out to a folder automatically without any pop-ups or user intervention. This lets you keep an archive copy of all your printed output exactly as it was originally produced. You can also process these files further, converting PostScript to PDF format for instance.

The dynamic file naming feature of Print Distributor lets you build up a folder structure and file name based on information from the print job. Include details such as the name of the user who printed the document, details from the date and time or even the original document name.

As an example if you want to archive all prints to a group of folders based on the name of the person who prints, the year, month and day and finally have the print file name include a serial number you could enter a path C:\Archive\?UN?\?YE?\?MO?\?DA?\?SN?.prn

In this example the text ?UN? gets converted automatically into the users name and ?YE?, ?MO? and ?DA? get converted into the year, month and day. Finally ?SN? gets converted into a unique serial number so your print file doesn't get overwritten by the next job. If any of these folders specified don't exist then they get created on the fly leaving you with a folder structure which looks like the image to the left.

The full range of fields includes the date broken down into minutes, hours, the day of the week, the day of the month, month and year. Also the size of the print document, number of pages, the job ID, a unique serial number, computer name, data type, printer driver name, priority, notify name and finally all or extracts of the document name.

Virtual printers provide a flexible mechanism for controlling your printed output with Print Distributor. They look like a normal Windows printer to your users and the software you print from, their operation is completely transparent. Whats really smart about them is instead of just sending your prints directly to a printer they can route jobs to many printers, balance jobs across a group of printers, print to file and even add conditions to print jobs.

A virtual printer can be shared just like a normal printer, this allows you to install Print Distributor on a server and connect to that server from workstations. This avoids having to install software on every client PC.

Once created you can set default settings and configuration for the printer which will be retained even after you reboot your PC.

You can print from UNIX, Linux, AS400 and Mainframes using the built in Windows LPD service through your virtual printer. Connect your output from business applications like SAP, JD Edwards, Sage and many others to different destinations and print rules.

Virtual Printers can use any Windows compatible printer driver, use PostScript, PCL, Generic Text or any other type of driver which meets your requirements.

Printer Load Balancing

Load balancing or printer pooling lets you spread your print load evenly over a group of printers automatically. Your users will print to a single printer then Print Distributor will then send the documents to each printer in the pool in turn.

Pausing a printer in the pool or an error status on the printer will cause it to be skipped automatically, as soon as it is released or the error resolved it will join the pool automatically.

There is no limit to the number of printers in the pool, add as many as you need. The name of the printer used is available for use in other actions including scripting and reprint.

The Accumulate action lets you hold back your printed documents and release them as a single document when you are ready.

This is useful if you are sending documents to another department or even an external organisation. Having a single large document is easier to manage than hundreds or even thousands of small files.

The collected batch can be released when you have reached a specified page count or file size. You can also trigger on a time out after the last document, this means you don't have to worry about documents being left in the batch. Finally the Accumulate action can watch for some trigger text, either in the content of the document or the document name. This is useful if you always print a certain type of document at the end of a batch.

Once the batch is triggered all of the standard Print Distributor actions are available to print to file, email, create a PDF or run a program.