Batch print documents, photos, PDFs with 2Printer

2Printer is a free (for personal use) Windows tool for batch printing PDFs, Office documents, photos, drawings and a whole lot more.

If you only print the occasional document then this isn’t the program for you. But if you run a business and need to print a folder of documents at the end of the month, say, it could save you some time.

The program installs as a console application, along with a few examples to show how it works.

Using a command line 2Printer.exe -s "C:\Input\*.*" will send all the files in a folder to the printer, for instance, while 2Printer.exe -l "C:\ToDo\input.txt" prints the files in the named list. You can define the number of copies, and send them to any named printer.

One notable issue with the program is that, aside from images, it doesn’t print files natively: instead they’re just passed to their own applications. As a result you’ll need Adobe Reader or Acrobat installed to print PDFs, AutoCAD or something similar to print DWGs, Word/ OpenOffice to print DOC/ DOCX, PowerPoint to print PPT/ PPTX, and so on.

The other problem here is that the free build prints an extra "nag page" at the end of every print job. If you’re using this as intended to run some major print job then you might not care much, but if you’re regularly printing a couple of single-page letters then this also isn’t going to be the program for you (although you could pay $149 to upgrade to the full version).

Overall, 2Printer works well, but the extra page means it’s best used for large print jobs only.