Running BarTender from Inside Other Programs

To run BarTender from within another program, you will need to consult the documentation for the other program. A good starting point is to search in the other product manual's index for the words Run, Spawn, Execute, and WINEXEC (which is the actual Windows function call used to load another program).

When you determine how to run an application from inside your other program, you can specify the desired command line to run BarTender. For additional information on specifying command line parameters, see Rules For Specifying Command Line Parameters.

Running BarTender from Within Other Programs Without Preloading

One way to execute BarTender from within another program is to include the /P and /X parameters on the command line inside the other program. This launches BarTender, prints a specified document, and exits the application when done.

The problem with this approach is that, as with any other full, stand-alone Windows program, BarTender takes some time to load from your hard drive and initialize itself. This delay, of anywhere between one and ten seconds (depending on the speed of your system) is usually insignificant if you execute only a few print jobs each day, especially if the jobs contain many items (since, in that case, the relative significance of the initial delay is minor). However, if you need to frequently print small numbers of items from within other programs, this delay can become inconvenient.

Preloading BarTender to Avoid Repeated Start up Delays

By preloading BarTender and leaving it running "in the background," you can print items from your other programs as you need them, without having to reload BarTender each time you execute a print job. Then, when you are done, you can issue a command telling BarTender to exit. To preload BarTender, execute one or more print jobs, and exit the application when done, you must enter a separate command line for each step:

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