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sleerfnivek
Inspiring
July 27, 2023
Question

Feature request - mark pages for printing

  • July 27, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 349 views

I was switching car/homeowners insurance policies today and was sent a pdf to esign. Afterwords, as is usually the case with such documents, I wanted to print the important pages. The total document was 46 pages. Out of those, there were about 8 that I wanted to print. This included the cards for the car insurance, (which always has a blank page with registration marks for some reason) A riders list, the page for some additional insurance on my camera gear, etc. 

As I've done for the past 20 years, I went through the document making note of the specific pages I wanted to print because printing all of it would be a complete waste. After finding a pen and jotting the pages down on the back of a receipt,,,1, 8, 14, 26, 27, 33, 39, 44, I went to print and manually entered the numbers as I've always done.....

But why? It's silly. And I'm not a unique case. Everyone I know goes through a similar routine when dealing with lengthy pdf documents which are not only becoming more common, but are also growing longer. With all the tools available in a full version of Acrobat, why is this such a monotonous process in 2023?  

I thought it through and this is something that could be made much easiser if Adobe simply decided to do so. If it is already there, my apologies. I did go through the menus to check before coming here to write this.

In a nutshell, there should be a "Queue Print" button that launches a small popup. I imagine there would be a few buttons as well as a running, editable list of pages marked to print. As you scroll throughand think "I need to print this: you can click the "Queue Print" button which launches the dialog box and adds the current page to the text field.If you know the page numbers of what else you want to print, you can add them in rather than scrolling through. If you change your mind about certain pages, you can remove them. It's just a helper app that serves the same function as the back of a receipt. Each time you land on a page you want to add, you don't have to type it though. Just click the "Add" button and it adds a comma behind the previous entry and the current page number. Click the remove button and the last entry is deleted. You can do this several times if you like. Or as I said, you can just highlight and delete whatever pages you want. When you're done, you just click "Send to Printer", the printer dialog opens, and the page numbers are added to the print queue. 

Voila! Problem solved! 
Of course, there is the manual editing part that could put bad info in the printer dialog but it wouldn't be any more likely than mistyping it and could be just as easily edited. It can be made as complicated as desired, with pages in the dialog appearing as animated number blocks that can be toggled on and off, or even rotated individually. But that's probably taking it too far. This is more what I was thinking. 

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2 replies

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 27, 2023

I've actually developed a (paid-for) tool some time ago that does something quite similar to what you described.
It's a bit more rudimentary, though, and relies on a simple check-box that is added to each page. You can then tick the box on the pages you're interested in and run a script to print only those pages (without having to write down their numbers anywhere) or even extract them as a new PDF file (Acrobat only).

You can find it here: https://www.try67.com/tool/acrobat-print-or-extract-selected-pages

 

Amal.
Legend
July 27, 2023

Hi @sleerfnivek 

 

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

 

You may also share your request with the engineering team using the link https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

 

Regards

Amal