Printing PDFs from Windows Command Line

I know this is and old question, but i was faced with the same problem recently and none of the answers worked for me:

• Couldn't find an old Foxit Reader version
• As @pilkch said 2Printer adds a report page
• Adobe Reader opens a gui

After searching a little more i found this: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/pdftoprinter.html.

It's a simple exe that you call with the filename and it prints to the default printer (or one that you specify). From the site:

PDFtoPrinter is a program for printing PDF files from the Windows command line. The program is designed generally for the Windows command line and also for use with the vDos DOS emulator.

To print a PDF file to the default Windows printer, use this command:

PDFtoPrinter.exe filename.pdf

To print to a specific printer, add the name of the printer in quotation marks:

PDFtoPrinter.exe filename.pdf "Name of Printer"

If you want to print to a network printer, use the name that appears in Windows print dialogs, like this (and be careful to note the two backslashes at the start of the name and the single backslash after the servername):

PDFtoPrinter.exe filename.pdf "\\SERVER\PrinterName"

I had two problems with using Acrobat Reader for this task.

1. The command line API is not officially supported, so it could change or be removed without warning.
2. Send a print command to Reader loads up the GUI, with seemingly no way to prevent it. I needed the process to be transparent to the user.

I stumbled across this blog, that suggests using Foxit Reader. Foxit Reader is free, the API is almost identical to Acrobat Reader, but crucially is documented and does not load the GUI for print jobs.

A word of warning, don't just click through the install process without paying attention, it tries to install unrelated software as well. Why are software vendors still doing this???

Looks like you are missing the printer name, driver, and port - in that order. Your final command should resemble:

AcroRd32.exe /t <file.pdf> <printer_name> <printer_driver> <printer_port>

For example:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /t "C:\Folder\File.pdf" "Brother MFC-7820N USB Printer" "Brother MFC-7820N USB Printer" "IP_192.168.10.110"

Note: To find the printer information, right click your printer and choose properties. In my case shown above, the printer name and driver name matched - but your information may differ.