Splitting (one-to-many) PDF job scenario

This scenario describes how you can divide a large PDF job into smaller ones. Benefits of this approach is that it might reduce overall printing time or share your printing resources.

In this example, an application produces one large job with 80,000 documents. The administrator wants to split the job to print 40,000 documents on one printer and the rest on another.

One-to-many usage scenario diagram

RICOH ProcessDirector supports job splitting using the document properties file. A document database is not required because the same input file is used for both the original job and the production job.

  1. You create a new workflow named LargeApp to receive and prepare the incoming data. For example, you can copy the SortSplitPDF workflow into a new workflow and name it LargeApp.
  2. In your new workflow, LargeApp, you specify a RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat control file in the IdentifyPDFDocuments step. This step creates a document properties file containing document property values for each document in the job.
  3. You define the SplitDocuments step in the Assemble phase to divide the job into the specified segments. If you do not want to sort or group documents, delete the steps that don't apply to your new workflow.
  4. You define the CreateJobsFromDocuments step which creates two production jobs (child jobs). In the CreateJobsFromDocuments step, you define the names of the RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat control files that add markup the PDF file.
  5. For the child jobs, you can either use the AssemblePDF workflow or create a copy of that workflow to define a specific workflow to print the child jobs.