Batch printing Adobe Illustrator

Question

I have a task to print a batch of illustrator files.
There are 8 AI documents and 1 CSV file. In the CSV file there are info that I need to change in the AI document before printing.
Actually I am doing this by using the AI reference in Visual Studio and using doc.printOut(), my problem is that it sends 1 file per printOut() to the printer and it is not that fast, the more printers I have, the more delay to send the document between the printers.

I was wondering if I could use another library to print this or use another function from this library. Maybe even using some batch actions inside illustrator, but I guess that wouldn't change much in performance, Well, I don't know.
Was reading some threads here and saw that the AI file is nearly identical to a PDF file, maybe load the documents within a adobe PDF reference in C# would help to print faster?

Any tips please?

Answer 1

Looking at the VBScript reference for printOut() I'm guessing that Illustrator does a lot of work before firing off a given print job (the PrintOptions object is a collection of options each of which has a dozen or so different settings to twiddle... no thank you).

I suggest you SaveAs() your file to PDF, and print that instead. PDFSaveOptions has a crap-load of options itself, but it looks like (almost?) all of them are optional.