cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

We are happy to announce the new Windchill Customization board! Learn more.

Batch Printing Module

GregOlson
15-Moonstone

Batch Printing Module

We are using the batch print module here at my company and have all sorts of issues and cases logged. Is anyone else using this to produce production prints? One specific question I have is in regards to the queue. Currently we have two printers that we use to produce prints, one for A and B size prints (cannon) and one for C and D size prints (HP). When the production department loads the drawings into batch print, the queue will only process one job at a time and waits for the printer to complete the job before moving on to the next one. So if we send a bunch of prints to the HP, the cannon will sit idle until the HP is finished, even though there are a ton job jobs that are ready for the cannon. Is there a way to change the queue so that it processes the jobs and send them to the printers memory? Both printers have memory and it seems like it's not being used. Note: I have logged a case with PTC on this, but as usual the TSE's have very limited knowledge of batch printing and how it actually works....help!

4 REPLIES 4

We are getting ready to use this module and this is a potentially big performance bottleneck. We will be having about 50 printers across 2 manufacturing sites.

GregOlson
15-Moonstone
(To:JoePriest)

Make sure that you fully test before flipping the switch. We have multiple issues/cases/SPR's open for batch printing. A couple of things you will run into:

1. There is an issue with auto selecting printers based on paper size, this is hit or miss.

2. When collecting items to print, sometimes your selections will not show up in the batch print UI

3. The jobs will not get fully printed......send 30 prints in one job and you will get 26 prints.

4. Cannot set default for collectors, lots of manual input needed to collect items

5. If you have more than one rep listed for the drawing you want to print, they will show up in the UI and you must exclude the one you don't want to print. We didn't know that scheduled publish jobs creates a batch rep along with the default rep....now we have to go back and delete out 10 of thousands of reps so only one shows up in the batch print UI.

If you know of these issues and have found resolutions...please pass on.

Thank you very much for the heads-up on that. We will look into those items and update you if we find solutions.

Hi,

If you want to use another machine (say CAD worker) to batch print, http://najanaja.com/plmworker could be a good solution.

The basic idea is you create your own custom collector which should be few lines of code (many are provided for you) and and send it to the CAD worker (or could be any Windows machine) where printers are mapped. You could send multiple files at once and define in an XML file what command to execute on those files - in this case print command.

Top Tags