I have been using PP7 suite for years, and have used the N-Up Printing object and the Telescoping Sort (in Workflow) to produce hundreds of N-Up postcard mailings...with .CSV data emulation

I now have a data file that uses Channel-Skip emulation that needs to print 8-Up, and the usual tricks aren't working.

Ideally, if the number of records is not divisible by eight, Telescoping Sort (with .CSV data) has padded the end of the file, imaging blank postcards in the bottom right corner of each sheet. Then, the sheets can easily be cut and stacked and remain in Presorted order.

But that is not happening with the Channel-Skip data. Once the final postcard is imaged in the bottom-right, Telescoping Sort is grabbing the next available record and imaging it in the bottom-right, throwing off the ordering of all subsequent postcards on the last few sheets.

Is there some combination of settings in the N-Up Printing object (in Designer) of the Telescoping Sort tool (in Workflow) to prevent this? Or do I need to find a way to pad the end of the file with blank records until the total is divisible by eight to achieve this?

I have reproduce the behaviour and it seems to be an issue with the Telescoping Sort plugin and Channel Skip.

From what I have seen, every time the plugin tries to pad with empty record, it doesn't add a CRLF after the code use for pagination (in my test, I used 1). Therefore, instead of having something like this:

you get:


Unfortunately, the Telescoping Sort plugin isn't supported. Most plugin found there are third party plugins which were added only so other users can, well...use them! They were not tested intensively by our Q&A department.

Now that being said, I know the author and will inform him of this behaviour but cannot say if this will be fixed or not.

In the mean time, you could write a script that looks at the first character of each line and if it is your Channel Skip skip page character then you can check if the following characters are a repetition of it. If so, then you could simply add a CRLF after each. Downside is if that character is also found as a repetition but is part of your actual data like this:


You would end up with undesired empty record, as an example.

Hope that clarifies thing.