Fixing Logician's cheesy printing with FinePrint

Without a doubt, one of Logician's weakest points is its printing support. When printing multiple documents, Logician sends each one to the printer individually rather than as a group. Since attachments are viewed in a browser window, it is not possible to print them in order with their original documents.

Where this really becomes a problem is using the integrated Biscom faxing. Because each document is sent to the fax separately, each one gets a separate fax cover sheet when it goes out and (presumably) is faxed in a separate call. For instance, when we fax pre-ops to the hospital, the hospital staff complains - understandably so - when they get hit with 10 cover sheets for what used to be one job. And faxing attachments? Not even worth the trouble.

Solution: FinePrint. I first heard about this product from one of Scott Hanselman's excellent posts. The application creates a virtual printer that intercepts your print jobs, allows you to manipulate them and then send them off to a real printer. It has quite a few features, such as reducing multiple pages onto one, etc., but only one of them - grabbing multiple print jobs at once - really helps Logician. But boy, does it help.

For instance, consider faxing multiple documents to another office, for say, a med-recs request. You can select all of the relevant documents (using shift-click, or to pick and choose, ctrl-click):

Print as usual, but select FinePrint as your printer:

All of the documents are loaded up in FinePrint's queue and ready to either be added to, selectively deleted, or just printed:
You can click back into Logician (without closing FinePrint) and print more documents to its queue. This is very helpful for adding attachments to the print job as you go.

If you end up with extra pages, or in the wrong order, you can right click on the queue to edit it:

Where I expect to see the biggest boost is with our med-recs request. Rather than having to print out (paper-wasteful) or print preview (time-wasteful) to find out the number of documents needed to fulfill a multi-part request, the staffer can now just use the total page count displayed by FinePrint to calculate the bill. And the best part: she can then just save the print job until payment comes in and then re-load it (without re-printing) and have it faxed or mailed in a flash.

FinePrint is well worth its $50 price. I've already noticed several other places in the practice this program may end up being a big help.