PrPages

PrPages is an interesting command-line application that can reduce the time you spend figuring out how much it’s going to cost you to print a given number of PDF documents.

Since the printing price varies according to the size of the pages and whether they are color or black and white, PrPages enables you to extract that exact information. With this tool you are able to calculate the total number of pages, their height, width, as well as the number of color and black and white pages.

This way, knowing the prices from your print shop, you are able to find out exactly how much you have to pay. This is an excellent tool to have in both small and large offices as it provides you with specific information that allows you to manage financial aspects in a more precise way.

PrPages isn’t all that easy to use at first since its run from the Command Prompt. Especially if you’re not familiar with this kind of environment. But on the other hand, it takes you just over a minute and six simple lines of commands to extract the information you need. It is indeed something that you can quickly familiarize yourself with.

The application can run in two modes that are differentiated by the use of the ‘S’ and ‘E’ options within the commands. When you use ‘E’, it tells the application to extract information for each color or black and white page that the document has. Using ‘S’, you get a summary of the entire target PDF file.

PrPages creates a CSV document after each successful run. The file contains the extracted information which is presented as an easy to understand sequence made up of ‘pagenumber, ‘pageheight’, ‘pagewidth’ and ‘color or bw/gray’. Keeping these files comes in handy for when you need to generate a statistic of all the printed material over a large period of time.

PrPages might not be the easiest to use office tool but it does save you time in figuring out costs for printing PDF documents and that seems a fair tradeoff.