There are some ins and outs, which should be considered when printing one or multiple PDF documents at once. In this guide, we'll review different aspects of PDF printing.
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These are basic print settings you can specify when printing office documents, including PDF files. These settings are available in most scenarios – if you print via standard Windows Print dialog, Acrobat Reader, a web browser, a PDF viewer or other software:
| Option | Description |
| Copies | Specifies the number of copies of the document to be printed |
| Duplex printing | Enables double-sided printing mode, i.e., printing on both sides of the paper |
| Orientation | Defines page orientation – portrait or landscape |
| Collation | Allows taking multiple different pages and putting them together into a complete set |
| Pages per sheet | Specifies how many pages should be printed on a sheet of paper |
| Paper size | Determines paper size (page format), e.g., A4 |
| Paper type | Specifies the type of paper, e.g., Light 60-74g |
| Paper tray | Specifies paper tray (paper source) if your printer has different trays |
| Color mode | Sets printing in color or grayscale (black and white) printing |
| Page autorotation | Enables rotation of pages within each sheet according to their width and height |
| Page scaling | Defines the positioning and scaling of PDF pages on sheets of paper. |
These are the most common parameters, and we'll cover more details on duplex printing, grayscale printing, printing password-protected PDFs, printing PDF with comments, and batch printing.
If you use Adobe Acrobat DC or Adobe Reader DC, these options are called Flip on long edge and Flip on short edge accordingly:
Flip on long edge (Long-edge binding) is best when printing a regular double-sided document on portrait orientation, whereas Flip on short edge (Short-edge binding) is best for printing documents on landscape orientation.
If the Print on both sides of paper option does not appear in this dialog box, open the printer properties (Properties button) to directly access this option from your printer.
In Print Conductor, you can set up this parameter by going to Settings > Advanced > Duplex and select between Long-edge binding or Short-edge binding (or keep printer default setting).
Many multi-function printers (MFPs) allow the printing on both sides manually or automatically – for a single multipage document. But what if there are 10, 20, 100 PDFs to print? Print Conductor can save time, especially when it comes to processing many PDF files at once. Besides, print settings can be applied to all files in the list or individual items only.
An alternative method is to set the duplex mode in your printer settings. This is the right choice if your printer already has some saved configuration (e.g., CMYK or RGB color mode).
Note: If you cannot see the duplex option in the Printer Properties, check your printing preferences first. Open Control panel > Devices and printers and right-click the printer you're using. Select Printing preferences and open the Printing shortcuts tab. There you will see Print on both sides or a similar option which can be turned on.
Printing documents in black and white is a good practice if your company policies allow you to do so. This can help save color ink/toner and, especially in combination with Draft mode, can save money on printer consumables.
Printing in black and white mode is simple, requiring an easy change of printer settings. Many color printers provide this option in the Printer Properties dialog box, i.e., it is available in the print dialog box.
It depends on the PDF viewer or software that you use, but the standard scenario is to:
You will see the print dialog box. Make changes here, if necessary.
Note: If you use Reader and Acrobat Standard, these applications do not have a black and white print option. It is suggested to turn on black and white mode through the print dialog box.
To process multiple PDF files and have them printed in grayscale (shades of grey) mode, just turn on Grayscale printing in Print Conductor.
Alternatively, if your printer lets you print PDFs black and white via printer settings (or you have a specific color profile saved in your device settings), you should set Color mode to As in printer in Print Conductor Settings > Advanced.
It's easy to get confused when you see different options in the printer settings: print in monochrome and print in shades of gray (also known as grayscale or composite gray).
Black and white (monochrome) prints all of the non-white colors in your PDF file as black, resulting in a simple monochrome printout. It has only two "colors", black and white (black ink/toner and no ink/toner).
Grayscale (composite gray) contains a combination of gray tones between black and white only. In provides a smoother image compared to monochrome, a continuous scale from black to white, with some halftone screen to get various shades of gray. This method is used in most modern multi-functional printers.
When a PDF document is created and saved, it can be encrypted with a password for security or other reasons by the author. For example, with Adobe Acrobat, you can set a password to single or multiple PDF files (via the Security Envelope tool). Some batch printing software like Print Conductor has an option to enter one or more passwords before the print session so that the program can print multiple secured PDFs without any problem.
Now the file is accessible for printing via the standard Google Drive print dialog. It also can be saved to PDF again, and the saved copy will not have restrictions from printing.
If you need to print several password-protected PDF files, you can use Print Conductor.
You can find this option in Settings > Advanced > Password list and enter a password (or passwords, each one on a separate line):
PDF documents or PDF Portfolio files can contain comments and mark-ups (annotations) made by users. Comments and annotations are contained on a layer over the PDF page. Different PDF viewers have a variety of printing options for printing comments and annotations.
You can print comments either as a list on the summary page or in place (like text highlights or sticky notes on each page). You can print PDFs with comments and mark-ups so that they appear on printouts from Acrobat or Reader. Find the Comments and Forms section in the print dialog window.
There are also other ways to set up the printing of comments and annotations. Alternatively, you can use the Flatten Markups option to merge the mark-ups into the PDF content, which ensures that they will always print from within Acrobat and other PDF viewers.
With Print Conductor, the printing of multiple documents is automated. So PDF annotations can be turned on/off for all added file by checking or unchecking the Draw annotations option:
You can print more than one page of a PDF onto a single sheet of paper. It's the right option to use if you need to print, e.g., multiple pages, images, or slides per sheet in PDFs. This feature is also called N-up printing (such as 2-up or 6-up); you can select a custom number up to 99. You can specify how the pages are ordered: either horizontally across the page or in vertical columns.
Note: The print settings of Acrobat or another PDF viewer don’t reflect the N-up settings of the printer drivers. Select the multiple pages options either in Acrobat or in the printer driver, but not both.
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If you don't use Acrobat but another PDF viewer, there is a way to set the multiple-pages-per-sheet mode in the print dialog box. To do it, follow these steps:
Printing several PDF pages on the same sheet of paper and processing multiple files at the same time can be automated with Print Conductor.
This way, you can print two or more pages per sheet. The necessary parameters can be adjusted under the Multiple pages per sheet section in Settings > Advanced.
Bulk printing of files with several pages per sheet is possible not only for PDF files but for other multipage documents too. Learn more about batch printing with multiple pages per sheet with Print Conductor.
Batch printing PDF can be very advantageous. With the right application (such as Print Conductor or FolderMill), you can easily send different filetypes – Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or PDF – and send them to the printer as a single print job. It comes in handy when, e.g., you need to quickly print a set of files that requires the use of all of these different formats or many various PDF documents. Another advantage of this approach is that you don't need to open each file manually and thus can save much time.
If you'd like to try Print Conductor, its trial version is available free of charge for testing and evaluation.
If you are looking for a fully automated PDF printing software, FolderMill can become a good Print Conductor alternative.
FolderMill works by assigning document processing Actions to a certain Windows folder, be it a local or network shared folder. After the initial setup, network users can drop files directly to the "Hot Folder", and their PDF files will be automatically printed or converted.
With FolderMill, you can map PDF and other documents to specific printers or printer trays or send converted files to any destination folder. Besides, there are many options to make the workflows flexible – incoming files can be filtered by paper size, file name, file size, or file extension.
The program allows configuring all basic settings in the interface and has additional features too, such as adding cover pages to separate printouts, saving lists of files, printing password-protected PDFs, and more.
Sometimes you may need to modify print settings for a certain group of files in the list and keep others intact. It is possible in Print Conductor. For instance, you can select PDFs only – using Ctrl or Shift button – and change various parameters like the number of copies, duplex mode, printer tray, and more.
Another option is to merge different files into a single PDF file beforehand. You can combine images, documents, text files, worksheets or PDFs, etc. into one multipage PDF and then just print it. This way, you can print a whole lot of documents very easily. Since all files will be contained within a single file, you'll avoid a situation when print jobs get mixed together (when different employees print their files at the same time on the same printer).
To combine your files together before printing, we suggest using a PDF merge tool such as Universal Document Converter or DocuFreezer.
DocuFreezer can be very useful, especially if you have several files to be merged into one. Once you have a multipage file you can use Print Conductor to print multiple pages per sheet.
Phrases "print PDF" and "print to PDF" may look similar, but they actually have a different meaning. "Print to PDF" means printing to a file, which implies saving an electronic copy of your file to disk (also called print-to-file function). So, besides physical printers that would print your document on paper, you can use this function to convert a document to PDF from almost any application. To do it, open a document and select File > Print. Then select a virtual printer such as Universal Document Converter or Adobe PDF Printer.
Once a virtual printer is selected, you can configure other options by clicking the Properties button (just like you would do with a regular printer) and click Print when ready.
If you have a document or image uploaded to Google Drive, you can save it to PDF the same way, using the print dialog:
PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most popular digital formats to create and keep documents nowadays. Many companies use PDFs for saving, viewing, and sharing contracts, applications, customer- and employee-related data, and many other things. The PDF format, developed by the Adobe Systems in the 1990s, stands for Portable Document Format. Initially, there was a need to share documents among different computers and operating systems without losing data and document formatting. Hence, to exchange data in an unaltered way, the PDF file format was created. The PDF format is still being maintained and upgraded with new functions. Below are the main seven advantages why PDF is one of the best formats to use.
Many applications and environments work with this format, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and others. PDF files can be uploaded to a cloud storage and easily shared and viewed on practically any device. Most importantly, the document keeps its original content and formatting unaltered after a file was sent from one system to another or opened in different applications.
Viewing or sharing PDF files is almost effortless. Many PDF viewers are freely available for doing these tasks. Even a web browser can open a PDF. Hence, you can read those files anywhere – on a computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Editing, however, may not be that easy without having the right tool – a PDF editor.
Any PDF file can be locked by a password. There are various levels of security you can set to protect a document with sensitive information. This way, you can keep important documents safe by restricting certain features, such as printing, editing, and copying content in the PDF.
PDF or PDF Portfolio files can also be encrypted with a certificate-based signature. When a PDF is protected using a certificate and signed with a digital signature, both the sender and the recipient are sure that documents are exchanged with a high level of security. A valid digital signature confirms the signer's identity and makes sure that a document was not modified after a signature was applied.
To minimize file size, you can compress PDF using Adobe tools or other applications. This can be useful for archival purposes or when you need to comply with specific restrictions regarding file size. Compression of data can be done using different compression algorithms so that you can set the acceptable image quality.
PDFs can contain various content like texts, images, charts, graphics, hyperlinks, file attachments, and annotations. Even music, SWF animations, and video clips are supported in PDF. This, along with advanced multimedia options, can be helpful when, for example, creating a PDF Portfolio.
Last updated: 2021-10-12
