Transaction Printing describes a mode of submitting a job to a printing device.

A digital printing

Digital printing

Digital printing refers to methods of printing from a digital based image directly to a variety of media. It usually refers to professional printing where small run jobs from desktop publishing and other digital sources are printed using large format and/or high volume laser or inkjet printers...

 system is attached to a computer database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

and many similar pages, called forms, are printed; each, for example, with a different person's data filling the form such as a monthly telephone or cable bill.

Transaction print jobs are different from 'publishing' print jobs in that the print controller does not know when the job will end when it starts. It may be printing a hundred, a thousand or a few million impressions before the 'job' ends. Many digital printing system's controllers are designed to ingest the entire job, arrange its resources according to the size of the job and then begin printing the job last page first so that what is produced is a 'book' with the user seeing the first page first. This 'publishing' model obviously does not work for 'transaction' printing and a controller using a different internal model for jobs must be used.