vic user
Veteran Member
at my work i am responsible for producing hard copies of electronically stored charts for our customers, and i have 15 large format printers at my disposal for this purpose.
last calendar year i printed around 65,000 nautical charts, and every year the numbers keep going up.
i am always on the lookout for ways of cutting down the time it takes to process orders, and one of the longest parts of the process is the actual retrieving of the files and sending to the printer(s).
thus, i asked my superiors to look into some better print management software than we currently use, but i doubt i will see anything concrete for quite a while, or maybe never.
the way the gov't works here, it takes 3 managers just to make a decision, then meetings, then more waste of money, etc..
anyway, i decided to try and tackle the situation myself, and went about it using QBASIC and DOS batch files, since i have experience with them due to my poking around with old computers.
and what do you know?
i now can drag and drop the associated zip files of the charts in question into a directory, and then a batch file recognizes that there are zip files there, extracts only the postscript files, and then the printers recognize that there are postscript files, then print the files, then everything in the directory gets deleted.
super sweet!
so yes, i don't know java or visual basic or c++ or any of the new fangled languages, but at least i can do some things with knowledge gained from using old computers.
chris
last calendar year i printed around 65,000 nautical charts, and every year the numbers keep going up.
i am always on the lookout for ways of cutting down the time it takes to process orders, and one of the longest parts of the process is the actual retrieving of the files and sending to the printer(s).
thus, i asked my superiors to look into some better print management software than we currently use, but i doubt i will see anything concrete for quite a while, or maybe never.
the way the gov't works here, it takes 3 managers just to make a decision, then meetings, then more waste of money, etc..
anyway, i decided to try and tackle the situation myself, and went about it using QBASIC and DOS batch files, since i have experience with them due to my poking around with old computers.
and what do you know?
i now can drag and drop the associated zip files of the charts in question into a directory, and then a batch file recognizes that there are zip files there, extracts only the postscript files, and then the printers recognize that there are postscript files, then print the files, then everything in the directory gets deleted.
super sweet!
so yes, i don't know java or visual basic or c++ or any of the new fangled languages, but at least i can do some things with knowledge gained from using old computers.
chris