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The printing of pages i.e. generating of PDF or Postscript and actual printing or sending of output files somewhere may be performed in two ways:

•Fred on a client computer generates the XML file with the content to be processed, and then sends it to the server. You need to open a page in Fred before you can perform this operation. This is known as 'client printing'.

•Fred on the client computer sends only the page ids to the server (../edo.ashx?cmd=Server Print); then the server opens the pages and generates the PDF.  This is known as 'server printing' and it does not require you to open pages. If you select more pages, have in mind that, depending on how your system is configured, it can generate multiple pages in one PDF, or one PDF per page.

Server printing

You can run the server printing from the Pages navigator on the pages main tab.

Select one or more pages, right-click and then select Print pages:

Alternatively, on the Editions main tab, open an edition, select one or more pages, and click the printer icon in the main toolbar.

When the print is complete, the message is displayed on the client:

Both operations by default create one PDF or Postscript file for all printed pages.

Technicalities about server printing

You can perform the asynchronous printing through Back4 in two ways:

•In the Edit print queue dialog box, untick Back4 Task, and set an appropriate value in the xmlQueue parameter, as on the following screenshot.

•Other way: Tick Back4 Task and remove the value of the xmlQueue. The printing is performed by Back4, that creates a task first. If you leave a value in the xmlQueue, the server would copy XML in the specified path.

The server print calls the method ..\edo\do.ashx?cmd=ServerPrint and the XML to print is generated by the server.

Technicalities about client printing

The client print calls the method ..\edo\do.ashx?cmd=Print to generate XML and to POST it to the server.