I see a few others have asked this question, or had this issue, but no replies, workable suggestions or solutions.
I have a binder full of perhaps 50 pdfs that I want to assemble into a portfolio to ease printing. It seems the portfolio feature is primarily targeted to on-screen, not print, but it should print in alpha order from what I read. The problem is that is does not, at least not consistently. We need to print 10-15 copies of the binder each week, and the individual pdfs are frequently updated. Ideally I would like to send the portfolio to the printer hand get all my copies without the need for manual collation or assembly (other than placing the docs in the actual binder).
In experimenting I have added to the beginning of my document names numbers (like 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 etc.) which should sort alphabetically, and in the print dialog I can preview the order and it is correct. The dialog that shows print progress shows the documents printing in the correct order, but on the printer they are not in the correct order. I have tried several printers with the same result.
My theory is that a portfolio, at print time, is still just a collection of pdfs sent individually so depending on the doc length, traffic on the network, status of the network printer etc. they will not necessarily print as one continuous document. Does that make sense?
What alternatives might I have? I have looked briefly at doing a book in InDesign but that does not seem to be the best solution ether (each of the pdfs are maintained and used separately and I do not want to tie them up in one indd file).
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
I am using Acrobat X Pro version 10.1.6 on a Windows 7 computer.