Printing triplicates of a single record

[woodlandtrek9]

I have a filemaker solution that is used to print out invoices. For the last few years, the invoices have been printed on pre-made triplicate forms on a dot matrix printer. This was slow, unreliable, and has caused a lot of headaches, so the company recently invested in a laser printer that prints and staple 3-part carbonless forms. The problem is that for the stapling to work, the print job needs to be sent as one 3-page document (not 3 copies of 1 page). My initial thought was to append to a pdf and then print that, but from what I read, Filemaker won't print multipage PDFs from container fields.

The FM server is run on a mac, but all the clients are on windows 7 or 10. Everyone is currently on FM13, but an update to FM15 is planned for the near future.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

 

Thanks for any advice you have.

Travis

[webko]

So don't print it directly from the container field - output to the temp path with Append to PDF and print that instead

[woodlandtrek9]

Is there some way to automate that printing process on windows once I have each PDF? There are usually several dozen invoices to print that all need to be done at once

[comment]

11 hours ago, woodlandtrek9 said:

the print job needs to be sent as one 3-page document (not 3 copies of 1 page).

1 minute ago, woodlandtrek9 said:

There are usually several dozen invoices to print that all need to be done at once

So how exactly would this have to be arranged if you were printing directly from Filemaker? And what if you had an invoice that stretches over two (or more) pages?

 

[woodlandtrek9]

The nature of the business is such that there is never a need for a second page. If that were to change, the printing setup would require it to be printed like this: 3 copies of each page (1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2) as one print job that would then be stapled.

[comment]

4 hours ago, woodlandtrek9 said:

there is never a need for a second page.

Well, a simple (albeit primitive, and difficult to maintain) solution would be to create a printing layout consisting of 3 identical pages.

Alternatively, if printing a single-page PDF from a container field is satisfactory (in terms of print quality), you could save the invoice as PDF and insert it into a container field in a new record of a printing table - then duplicate that record twice.

 

Edited October 12, 2016 by comment