I doubt it's possible with Automator actions. Automator's printing functionality is rather limited in that it prints the document or it doesn't. Even the MS Word print action for Automator only offers up a few options (number of copies, collating and print ranges).
Now, you could use command line tools to do this. Setup two folders - one for A4 and one for A3. Let's do the A4 printing first.
For the A4 folder, instead of a print action, create a "Run Shell Script" action. To get the proper command, you'll have to get your printer name first. To do that, open up a Terminal and execute the following:
That will list your printers. I get the following:
Code:
Canon_MP210_series accepting requests since Sun 20 May 12:34:00 2012
PTO_Office_Printer accepting requests since Tue 3 Apr 15:09:41 2012
uOttawa_Printer accepting requests since Thu 25 Aug 11:03:30 2011
The name is the first part of each line (Canon_MP210_series, PTO_Office_Printer and uOttawa_Printer). Remember the name of the printer you want to use.
Back to Automator. As the value for your shell script, enter the following:
Code:
lp -d “<PRINTER NAME>” -o media=A4 "$@"
Replace <PRINTER NAME> with the appropriate value. As you can see, this is for the A4 folder (the media=A4 bit). The "$@" part is used in getting the name of the file that was recently added. You need to get this because the name of the file that is dropped into the folder has to be stored in memory temporarily. This is where we are going to set and get the value of what are called variables (simply put, they're like temporary post-it notes in memory that store content).
A picture truly is worth a 1,000 words and I think a picture will make this more clear. Here's a picture of how I think this might need to be setup for an A4 folder (again, you'll need to replace the printer name):
Now, this is a theory - I haven't got any paper at the moment so I'll leave it up to you to test. If that works as I think it should, once the file is dropped in, the name of the file should be added to memory, retrieved and passed to the command. Let us know how it works! If that works, we can modify it for the A3.
