Document review

Print PODs, source documents, and batches

Every print action in Conterminal opens a new tab and fires your browser's print dialog for you. Which page you land on depends on what you are printing — a generated POD, the original file a customer sent, or a merged batch — and each one has its own gate, its own caps, and its own failure text. This is the map.

8 minute read · Updated July 27, 2026

Printing always opens a new tab.

No print action prints in place. Each one opens a second tab, loads the document there, and then opens the print dialog. If your browser suppresses that tab, nothing happens at all and you get no error — check for a blocked-popup indicator in the address bar before you assume the document is broken.

The four print surfaces

There are four things you can print, and it is worth knowing which one you are on, because the toolbar, the wording, and the limits differ.

Surface	What it prints	Where you start
POD	A proof of delivery Conterminal generates for one delivery order — two copies on one letter sheet.	The shipment page actions menu, or the confirm screen.
Source document	The original PDF as it arrived, byte for byte. Nothing is re-rendered.	The confirm screen's Actions menu, or the source-documents list on a shipment.
Inbox attachment	The stored source file behind one Document Review item.	The Print PDF button on any review screen.
Batch	Several documents merged into one PDF, in the order you selected them.	The selection bar at the bottom of the needs-review list, or the multi-container confirm grid.

Three of the four — source document, inbox attachment, and batch — share one dark toolbar with a title on the left and two controls on the right: Open PDF, which opens the raw file in another tab, and a print button whose label changes per surface. The print button stays disabled until the embedded PDF finishes loading, and the line under the title narrates the whole sequence: a loading message, then a loaded message, then “Print dialog opened. If it did not appear, use Print PDF.” Read that line before you click anything twice.

Auto-print fires once, about a third of a second after the PDF finishes loading, and never again on that tab. If you dismiss the dialog you will not get a second one automatically — use the print button in the toolbar.

Printing a POD

The POD is generated by Conterminal, not stored. Two identical copies land on one letter portrait sheet with a dashed CUT guide between them, so the driver leaves one behind and brings one back.

Open the actions menu on the shipment. Choose Print POD. A new tab opens immediately showing Opening POD PDF... and then loads the generated PDF. If a signed POD has already been uploaded, a second item, Print Signed POD, appears — that one opens the uploaded file instead of the generated one.
Or print the blank from Gate Records. Open Blank POD and the Print Blank POD item behind its chevron both open the same generated PDF. They are not two different documents.
Print from your PDF viewer. These entry points hand you a plain PDF, so the print dialog is your browser's, not Conterminal's. The file is named after the POD routing code — the same code printed on the barcode.

There is also a rendered POD page at /pod/<delivery order id>. It is the only surface that auto-prints a POD for you: it fires the print dialog a quarter-second after it renders and carries a single blue Print POD button. On a phone-width screen you see a one-copy mobile layout, but what actually prints is still the two-up sheet.

The menu items named “Print POD” do not open that page. They open the generated PDF directly, which means no Conterminal print button, no auto-print, and no two-up preview before you commit paper. If you want the auto-printing page, go to it by URL.

Who can print a POD: Carrier workspaces only. The POD endpoints check that your active workspace is a carrier tenant workspace; anything else gets a flat {"error":"Forbidden"} response in the new tab. The rendered page additionally requires the tenant_admin, tenant_manager, or tenant_user role and redirects a workspace mismatch to the unauthorized page.
When there is no POD: If the delivery order has no printable POD record, the tab shows {"error":"Proof of delivery is not available for this delivery order."} That is a data problem on the shipment, not a printing problem.

For getting a POD signed on a phone instead of on paper, see electronic proof of delivery.

Printing the original source PDF

When a driver needs the paperwork exactly as the customer sent it, print the source document. Conterminal streams the stored original — it does not rebuild it from parsed fields, so what comes out of the printer is what came in.

There are two routes to it, and they are not interchangeable.

From the confirm screen: Open the Actions menu and choose Print source document. The tab is titled Delivery Order Print, its print button reads Print DO, and the status line runs from “Loading delivery order PDF...” to “Delivery order PDF loaded.” It is tied to the specific ingest event you are confirming.
From the shipment page: The source-documents list on a shipment prints a specific stored attachment. That tab is titled Delivery Order Source Print, its button reads Print PDF, and the status line runs from “Loading delivery-order source PDF...” to “Delivery-order source PDF loaded.”

The confirm route requires a carrier workspace plus read access to the delivery order. The shipment route is broader — any portal membership with read access to that delivery order — but it also checks that the attachment actually belongs to that delivery order and is in a reviewable state. Fail either check and you get a plain 404, not an explanation. See confirming a delivery order for the surrounding workflow.

Printing an inbox attachment

Every Document Review screen — assignment, warning, POD, interchange receipt, and archived — carries the same Print PDF button next to the archive control. It opens the attachment print page in a new tab, titled Inbox Attachment Print, with “Loading attachment PDF...” in the status line until the file is ready.

If the button is replaced by a greyed-out PDF unavailable, the stored source file is gone. The review screen says so directly: “The staged source PDF is no longer available. The parsed metadata is still shown here for reference.” Nothing you do in the browser will bring it back — the extracted fields survive, the file does not.

This surface is open to carrier, receiver, and freight-forwarder workspaces, including collaborators, which makes it the most widely available print path in the product. The attachment must belong to your organization and still be in a reviewable state; otherwise the print URL 404s even though the review screen loaded fine a moment ago.

Batch printing selected inbox rows

The needs-review list has a checkbox column. Select rows, and a bar appears along the bottom of the table.

Select the rows. Use the per-row checkboxes, the header checkbox labeled Select all visible documents, or — on a narrow screen — the Select all visible button above the list. Rows with no attachment behind them cannot be selected at all; their checkbox simply is not rendered.
Read the count. The bar shows the selection in the language of the queue you are in, for example 3 delivery orders selected or 1 proof of delivery selected.
Print. The button carries the same noun and count — Print 3 Delivery Orders, or just Print Delivery Order for a single row. It changes to Preparing… while Conterminal checks the selection.
Let the merged tab open. If every selection is printable, a new tab opens with the merged job: “Merging selected documents...”, then “Merged print job loaded.”, then the print dialog. Documents are merged in the order you selected them, and a row selected twice is only printed once.

When the preflight objects

Before opening anything, Conterminal checks each selected document. If some cannot be printed, the bar turns amber and names up to three of them, with an ellipsis if there are more — for example 2 can't print (invoice.xlsx: not a PDF; scan-2.pdf: no source file). There are exactly three reasons:

not a PDF: The stored file is not a PDF. Only PDFs can be merged into a print job — an image or an Office file has to be printed from its own review screen.
no source file: The row exists but has no stored file behind it. Nothing to merge.
not available: The document could not be found under your organization. Usually it was archived, reassigned, or removed while your selection was open.

The print button then becomes Print 2 Delivery Orders anyway, which drops the unprintable rows and prints the rest. If nothing at all is printable, it reads No printable documents and is disabled.

Your selection clears itself.

Whenever the visible rows change — a new document arrives in the queue, you change a filter, you page forward — the selection is wiped and the preflight resets. On a busy inbox this can happen between selecting and clicking. If the bottom bar disappears while you are working, that is what happened; reselect and go again.

For carrier workspaces the needs-review list is paged at 25 rows, which is exactly the batch cap, so Select all visible can never build an oversized job. Freight-forwarder workspaces use the express-review table instead, which has no batch print.

Batch PODs

When one document carries several containers, the confirm grid lists every delivery order on it. Rows you have already confirmed stay visible, dimmed, each with its own Print POD link. Once more than one row is confirmed, a Print PODs (4) link appears in the grid header and prints all of them as one merged PDF.

This is a direct PDF, not a print page: there is no Conterminal toolbar and no auto-print, so print from your browser's viewer. Access is re-checked per delivery order as the file is built.

Batch PODs have no preflight and no warning. A delivery order you cannot read, or one with no POD available, is dropped from the merged file silently. The only signal is the count in the file name — pods-3.pdf when you asked for four. Count the pages before you hand them to a driver.

Suppressing auto-print with ?preview=1

Every print page accepts ?preview=1. Add it to the URL and the page loads the document without firing the print dialog — useful when you want to check a document, screenshot it, or embed it without a printer prompt jumping the queue.

On the PDF-backed pages the toolbar stays, so you can still print on demand from the button. The POD page behaves differently.

/pod/<id>?preview=1 hides the toolbar as well as the auto-print, so there is no Print POD button on the page at all. That is deliberate — this is the mode the shipment page uses to embed a POD preview — but if you reach it by hand and want to print, remove the parameter and reload.

The value must be exactly 1. Writing ?preview=true or ?preview=0 does nothing at all, and the page auto-prints as usual.

Real limits

Single-document printing has no caps. Batches do, and they are enforced on the server, so trimming the URL by hand will not get you past them.

Limit	Cap	What you see
Inbox documents per job	25	“Select at most 25 documents per print job.”
PODs per batch	25	“Select at most 25 PODs per print job.”
Total size of a merged job	120 MB	“The selected documents exceed the batch size limit. Print fewer at once.”
Pages in a merged job	300	No specific message. The tab shows the generic “Failed to build the merged print job”.
Mergeable file types	PDF only	Anything else is reported by the preflight as not a PDF and excluded.

Two more responses are worth recognizing. If none of your selection has a usable file, the tab reads “None of the selected documents have a printable PDF.” If the files exist but none of them could be read from storage, it reads “The selected documents could not be loaded.” The first is about the documents; the second is about storage, and is worth reporting.

Troubleshooting

The preflight says some documents are not printable

Match the reason to the fix. “not a PDF” means the stored file is an image or an Office document — open that row's review screen and print it on its own. “no source file” means there is nothing stored to print, and no retry will change it. “not available” usually means the row moved out from under your selection while it was open; reload the list and reselect. Printing anyway is safe: it drops exactly the named rows and merges the rest.

The merged PDF is shorter than what I selected

A document that passed preflight can still fail when its file is fetched from storage, and that failure is skipped silently rather than aborting the job. Compare the number in the downloaded file name — inbox-documents-4.pdf or pods-3.pdf — against how many you selected. If they disagree, print the missing ones individually from their own review screens and tell support which ones dropped.

The download stops partway and I get a size error instead of a PDF

The 120 MB ceiling is measured as the files are pulled together, not before, so a big job can run for a few seconds and then fail outright with “The selected documents exceed the batch size limit. Print fewer at once.” Nothing partial is produced. Split the selection roughly in half and print two jobs.

“Failed to build the merged print job”

This generic message covers the 300-page ceiling as well as unexpected merge failures — the page cap has no message of its own. If your selection is large or includes long multi-page scans, assume the page cap first and print in smaller groups before reporting it.

The print button in the toolbar is greyed out

It stays disabled until the embedded PDF finishes loading. Watch the status line under the title: while it still reads “Loading...”, the document is not ready. A line that never changes usually means the file itself failed to load — use Open PDF to see the raw response.

The tab opened but no print dialog appeared

The status line will already tell you: “Print dialog opened. If it did not appear, use Print PDF.” Click the print button in the toolbar. If the dialog came from the page rather than the document, the line reads “Print dialog opened from the page fallback.” — the print will still be correct.

The new tab shows {"error":"Forbidden"}

POD printing, including batch PODs, is restricted to carrier workspaces. If you are signed in under a receiver or freight-forwarder workspace, switch workspaces first. A response of {"error":"Unauthorized"} means your session expired — sign in again and retry.

The print URL 404s even though the document is right there

Print routes re-check ownership and state independently of the screen you came from. An attachment that has been archived out of a reviewable state, a source document that does not belong to that delivery order, or a delivery order you have lost read access to all produce a bare 404. Go back to the shipment or review screen and use the button there rather than a saved URL.

Contact

Before writing in, check three things: that the new tab was not blocked, that the status line in the toolbar actually reached its loaded message, and — for batches — that the count in the merged file name matches what you selected. Those three account for nearly every print that appears to fail silently.