Customized Paging (was Re: multiple routing slips on one sheet of laser printer paper)

[Bob Rasmussen <ras at anzio dot com>]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Mark Dahl wrote:

> We're interested in printing a few routing slips on one sheet of 8.5X11 paper.
> Right now with or without Print Wizard, when we print a routing slip to our
> laser printer, an entire sheet comes out, even if the routing slip is just two
> lines long.  So my question is: is there a way to make Print Wizard
> consolidate multiple print jobs on a single page?  In other words, how can one
> queue (serials) routing labels?

This is one of several questions I've seen lately expressing an interest,
even a need, to reformat the paging (routing) slips produced by
Innopac/Millennium. I know of one site that has done this extensively;
I'll tell you what they've done, how they do it, and what the future might
hold.

THE PROBLEM(S)

III outputs a full-page slip for every item. The usual procedure is to
insert the slip into the book on the shelf. This does not make it easy to
route the material, nor is it easy to find a book on the shelf.

Also, the slip contains the patron's name and address, among other things,
and this raises privacy concerns for some, especially in a self-help
environment.

Finally, there is no sorting of the slips, such as by target location.

ONE APPROACH

The Tulsa County Public Library worked with a consultant named John Huber
to take a big-picture look at paging. Interestingly, John is not a
librarian, but has a background in industrial process management.
John worded primarily with Richard Nuckolls at the library. Together they
developed a series of improvements.

I found out about this when John contacted me, because he wanted to use
Print Wizard (our product) to format the data. And in fact, the process
does use Print Wizard, in some creative ways. The output of the process is
that each paging slip is reduced to a label, with six labels per sheet.
The label layout is designed so that, when the label is applied to the
book, the most important information is visible on the spine of the book.
In general, text is rearranged, printed in various sizes and rotations,
and there is an actual barcode printed, containing the patron's barcode
ID.

Critical to the process is selection of the label stock. These folks
worked with Neil Trowbridge at Global DocuGraphiX who researched quite a
number of labels from different suppliers to find one with the proper
adhesion characteristics. Because of their choices, they refer to this
whole project as "the Pink Label Solution".

HOW IT WORKS

1) A Windows program written in Visual Basic, known as "Paging", is
started on a client PC.

2) The Paging program starts up Print Wizard (PW) in "listen mode",
configured to capture received jobs to a file (rather than print them).
So now there are two programs running, "in the background".

3) The user, through Millennium (or Innopac), generates the paging slips
and "prints" them to the Workstation JetDirect printer. This sends them to
the client PC, where...

4) Print Wizard captures each batch to a file.

5) Paging, still running in the background, periodically checks the output
location where PW puts its files. When it sees a file there, it springs
into action to process the file. Keep in mind that the file contains the
plaintext paging data, exactly as output by III.

6) Paging reads in the file, sorts the slips into the desired order, and
processes each slip.

7) Processing a slip involves discarding certain parts, rearranging
others, and merging the wanted data with a template containing Print
Wizard Markup Language (PWML - looks like HTML). The PWML instructs PW on
how to print the data.

8) The output is written to a file.

9) The Paging program launches another instance of Print Wizard, telling
it explicitly to print that file.

10) Output is to a laser or inkjet full-sheet printer loaded with label
stock.

In summary, note that PW is used twice; once, at the head of the line, to
receive the print data from III, and again, at the end of the line, to
actually print the (reformatted) data.

Pretty clever!

THE FUTURE

I am thinking about this process, and trying to figure out an easier, more
flexible process. Possible enhancements to PW for this purpose include:

1) An ability to have PW send its received data out through an external,
user-written (in any language) filter process, and then read back in the
result. This would mean only one instance of PW would need to be run.

2) An ability to have within PW a "template" or "pattern" that specifies
how each group of input print lines should be treated. Processing would be
similar to a mail merge operation in Word, for instance.

FOR NOW, FOR MORE INFORMATION

You can contact Richard Nuckolls, Tulsa County Library, at
   rnuckol at tulsalibrary dot org

Richard can send you a ZIP file containing all the elements of their
solution, including VB source and sample files. Note that this is
*unsupported*. Some parts of the VB program are specifically for Tulsa's
situation, so some VB programming would be required in order to adapt this
to your location.

The ZIP also contains a version 2.5 demo of Print Wizard, but
later versions are available as below.

John Huber, the consultant, can be reached ar
   jhaconsults at cox dot net
He also has a website at
   www.jhaconsults.com
John is available for consulting work.

For label stock, contact:
   Neil C. Trowbridge
   Global DocuGraphix
   ntrowbridge at GDXinc dot com
   918.664.4345 Ext. 104
   Fax 918.665.1775

Current Print Wizard demos are available at http://www.anzio.com, along
with pricing and ordering information. Note that this project, and any
work with Millennium, requires use of the Server Edition of Print Wizard.

A sample of the Pink Label output can be seen at
   http://www.anzio.com/~ras/pinklabel.pdf
(Note: in order to generate this with the current version of Print Wizard,
minor adjustments had to be made to Paging's output.)

I will be at IUG, available for brainstorming and browbeating.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio dot com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio dot com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com