Home / Why is pdf not supporting copies per page?

For example if i have an pdf with 3 pages, and i want

page 1 printed 50 times,
page 2 printed 100 times
page 3 printed 75 times

i have to generate an pdf with 225 pages and sent them to the printer.
Depending on the pages (especially joined pdf from different pdf) such
a pdf is growing extremly in size, also the print job.

So why is there no support for setting a number for copies for each page
when creating a new pdf, so i get a pdf with only 3 pages. And if i print
the pdf document with copies 1: I get page 1 50 times printed, page 2 100 times
printed and so on.

I searched the internet if somebody have an similar problem, but i found nothing.
So i am wrong, and there is a way to do this?
When not, it should no big problem to change an opensource pdf viewer for that.
Only a compatible way to store the copies per page in the pdf file must found, right?

Background:
I write an program to generate pdf files for label printing, with python/reportlab.
Printing is actually done with python/gsprint and a second file that contains the copies per page,
that must be printed. But usage is limited, specially if you want to distribute the pdf.
Also gsprint is discontinued, and i searching for an alternative.

Actually i use an old version of an program like NiceLabel. But in the current versions
of NiceLabel they licence not only per cpu, also per printer. And that drives me crazy.
It they make a good program i pay for it, but licensing per printer is just rip off.

SumatraPDF as a PDF reader is not designed like a commercial print processor however it can send instructions to the windows printer system to process each page a number of times. In previous Windows this worked fairly well, however windows 10 especially makes it more problematic. Same as other file handling issues.

There are increasingly a number of limitations with any lightweight app and you may still need to search for a more dedicated power hungry option such as acrobat or better.

For SumatraPDF to send bitmap images of the pages to the current default windows printer or try to send to another print driver there are command line options. see https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Command-line-arguments.html

so with test.pdf and your quantities above I would call (check smaller amounts first)
sumatrapdf -print-to-default -print-settings “1-3,50x” test.pdf
sumatrapdf -print-to-default -print-settings “2-3,25x” test.pdf
sumatrapdf -print-to-default -print-settings “2,25x” test.pdf

There are other ways to make that call as a single line but for repetitive use you can more easily use a batch file.

With large quantities then memory in the printer and free memory in the system may suggest just repeating say 25 at a time, did I say this was not designed for bulk usage.