sprint works by formatting the page (if required), then drawing it to each specified printer driver in turn. It then goes to the next page, formats, prints, etc. Because the format only happens once per page, variable printer-based formatting, i.e. any attempt to make the macro work differently depending on the printer defined, will fail.

Although it is possible to specify up to 5 control streams at a time, they don’t all have to contain print instructions. For example, you can define 3 streams that contain format instructions, print settings and view options and then call sprint with all 3 streams. This will set your views, format the document and carry out the requested print operation all at the same time. As another example, running sprint with just the format stream will format the document without printing.

Format and draw level settings MUST be provided in the first sprint control stream. If the first stream contains no format settings, no format will be carried out and the whole operation will fail, regardless of any format parameters in the other 4 streams.

Multiple view settings in multiple control streams will combine together. If, for example, you have one stream that sets up view 1, a second stream for view two and so on, calling sprint with both streams at the same time will turn on both views as if you had one stream with both view settings.

With regard to printer settings, the order in which the sprint control streams are specified is significant. Whenever there is a conflict between multiple settings (such as with crop marks, registration marks or page ranges), the first relevant stream takes precedence. Note that, unlike the format settings, if the first stream only contains format info and the remaining streams are printer only streams, sprint will look for the first stream that contains printer settings when assessing next steps.

Attempting to sprint to single page outputs (e.g. PNG) and multiple page outputs (e.g. PDF, PS) at the same time (note: not via different “one page per file” / “all pages per file” options) can produce unpredictable results. If the single page printer is given first, all printers will work in single page mode. If a multiple page printer is given first, the single page printer will still be single page but all the multiple page printers will still be in multiple mode. This was implemented to prevent PTC ALD from, for example, printing 32 pages of data into a single image file.

The same printer driver cannot be used multiple times, since some printers are actually using the same driver underneath. For example, HTML, RAW, and at least one of the EDGAR drivers are all the same. It is possible to overcome this problem by duplicating one of the relevant drivers.