On a daily basis I want to print on the same page (same piece of paper) twice. Setup is that I create a mailing label. Top half of page is the address, etc and the bottom half is mostly blank, but includes the tracking number to keep when you cut the page in half.
But I want to add more info on that tracking number stub (who, what, when, how much, etc.) so I take the page out of the printer and put it back into the input tray and print. I have no control over what prints when the label is printed, and complete control over the extra info I print.
Taking the paper out works, but is error prone, a complete pain, and will cause me to replace the drum twice as soon.
What I would love to have is a print driver that will store the first print, wait for the second print, combine them on top of each other and print the page. If it did just that automatically, I would be very happy.
I have looked around for solutions. There are legions of programs that offer n-up, concatenating pages, etc. Or it has been suggested to me to create 2 PDFs and then use one of the Adobe programs to combine them. Not quick or easy and I am guessing far from free. Fineprint could be used to do it, but there is no way opening 2 PDFs in a GUI, marking and cutting and pasting is easier than putting the sheet of paper back into the printer.
With all the free PDF creation and FAXing print drivers around, I would hope that this would not be difficult driver to write. (But what do I know, my programming skills are limited to very simple scripts.)
Another use for something like this would be to print a letterhead from one program and then the letter from another.
If anyone has any suggestions on what to use, I would really like to hear them. Thanks.
Alex Armstrong, Toronto.
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