Question

I am trying to automate printing to a file on windows. For each file, I would like somehow to have the print job mapped to a unique file. I was only able to go as far as all print jobs print to the same file overwriting the old one. Any ideas

Answer 1

Use a filename that has a high probability of being unique: a concatenation of date and time elements:

{descriptivefilename}-{ms}-{s}-{m}-{h}-{year}-{day}-{month}.{ext}

If you’re using a batch file, add this line after printing:

for /f "tokens=1-5 delims=:" %%d in ("%time%") do COPY "C:\myprintfile.prn" %%d-%%e-%%f.prn

This will copy the print file to a filename that should be unique since it includes the fractional seconds. On subsequent passes, the previous print job will be overwritten and copied to its own filename, which represents the time it was done printing.