Using two printers with FileMaker

[john9210]

FM 11 Adv. I use two printers in my work: a laser and an inkjet. The laser is the default and I do a lot of quick printing with Ctrl+P. Occasionally, I’ll print to the inkjet. But FM remembers this and the next time I want to print to the laser I have to remember to select the laser in the Print dialog (bummer!). I thought I could get around this with a scrip that prints to the inkjet and then resets FM to the laser

My script has two printing steps: Print, which prints to the inkjet, followed by Print Setup which I set to the laser. However, after I run the script I find that the Print Setup setting has switched to the inkjet! What’s going on? Is there any way to do what I want to do?

[bcooney]

FM remembers the last printer that you actually printed to (nothing to do with Page/Print Setup).

[john9210]

No way to change that?

[bcooney]

not that I'm aware of.

[Rick Whitelaw]

I believe your Print Setup script step should precede your Print step. Thre are printer chooser plugins, but there is also another way, at least on Mac. I believe on PC this would involve VB scripting. Basically you set up a preferences table that identifies which printer to use by type of task . . . Cheques, general, labels etc. then script on the OS level to completely bypass the FileMaker print dialogs. I've done it using AppleScript to call shell scripts and it works fine, but I'm Windows challenged.

[bcooney]

Rick, if he wanted to "hard-code" the printer by layout, he could easily do that with a native FM script by simply including Print Setup/Print. His request was to print to an inkjet and then "reset" to the laser.