Conditions...

Can a condition be set up to only put a file in the printer queue if the queue is empty?

That way you get the load balancing, combined with a more windows-style printing?

We will be releasing a new build tomorrow which will add some improvements to the load balancing.

Build 2069 which is on the download page has some enhancements to the load balancing.

To get the best out of it you need to enable SNMP on the ports for network attached printers.

I've been testing the new version.

I looked at the help files and such and I'm not sure what changed in the scripting globals or conditions... It seems to work the same to me.

Here's what I'm trying to do.

We have 5 large format 42" plotters. These can take anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes per page (some longer plots can take upwards of 10-15 minutes). Each plotter has a two job internal queue (even with it's queue off) one to print, and one to process.

95% of the jobs that get sent to them are single page jobs from AutoCAD.
Of those, 20% are just single plots to check something or as a reprint of a larger previous job.
The rest (about 75% of the total plots) are single page jobs, published from an AutoCAD project that can be 20 to 120 pages.


So... I'd like to make sure that my plotters are being pretty evenly utilized.

So what I would like is this:
Each page is sent sequentially to the plotters just like a typical print distributer queue, until all the printer queues are full (10 jobs) and one job is in each of the windows queues (15 total jobs).
Then, the PD queue keeps the rest. When one of the plotters gets done with a page and takes it's job out of it's windows queue, PD puts the next job into that queue, just like windows printer pooling.


The problem with Print Distributer for this type of printing is if somebody sneaks in a 40 page PDF in the middle of these single pages, PD just keeps piling on 1/5th of some poor guy's project onto a queue that will take 45 minutes to plot.

The problem with Windows printing for this type of printing is when you print 5 pages (5 seperate printing jobs), printer 1 takes 2, printer 2 takes 2, and printer 3 takes 1... leaving printers 4 and 5 sitting around doing nothing.

I understand, unfortunately this is beyond the capability of the scripting in Print Distributor.

That's fine. I'll just make 4 of them be single page job printing for AutoCAD, and the last one do all the multi page jobs.

Thanks for the info.