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Searching here, I found the question Embedding printer settings in pdf - while related, this appears to apply to printer settings for the entire PDF, not for changing printer settings per page.

Our (normal) printers are configured as follows:

Tray 1 is a manual feed that is unused.
Tray 2 holds plain paper.
Tray 3 holds Letterhead.
(other printers may contain 2 more trays with other paper)

The printers are used by clusters of 12+ people. They would like to be able to choose between plain paper and letterhead when printing their MiKTeX (pdfTeX) generated PDF documents.

The pdfs are multipage documents (from 2 to 80+ pages) and may require letterhead for more than just the first page. For instance, pages 1, 2, 27 and 30 in a 35 page document. When printing, they would like the paper tray source changed mid-stream.

Has anyone else had a similar situation and come up with a solution? I'm perplexed at whether this is simply a device configuration problem or something that needs to be resolved by the "printing procedure".

I've looked around, but haven't found a device configuration solution that offers changing the paper tray back and forth mid-stream. Am I looking in the wrong places?

One "printing procedure" solution is to intercept the Postscript sent to the printers and add/edit papersource commands. To do this I store application specific information in the PDF(s) - for instance something that says that specific pages are "letterhead" otherwise default to "blank". I can either add a dictionary via \pdfobj (which gets ignored by Adobe - mostly) or I could write a \pagepiece dictionary via \pdfpageattr.

infowanna
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1 Answers1

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See Create a PDF that defaults to flip on short edge when printed double-sided (on Super User): This is not supported by consumer-grade PDF software; you'd need JDF (a kind of job ticketing format for PDF printing workflows) for that.

  • thanks, I believe your answer is that "changing the paper tray mid-stream is not supported by consumer-grade PDF software." Darn! I was just checking to make sure. I guess I'll have to choose between the two ("printing procedures") solutions I've got and tell people we generate non-standard pdfs. – infowanna Oct 30 '12 at 09:47
  • @infowanna: To be more precise: Selecting printer features is not supported by PDF per se (as PDF is hardware agnostic). JPDF was developed for that, but is only used in printing houses. – Martin Schröder Oct 30 '12 at 10:04