Chapter 12

Printing

The GDI controls the display of graphics on the monitor and printers. It provides a set of standard functions that let applications communicate with graphics devices, without knowing anything about the devices. The GDI enables application code to be independent of the hardware devices and their drivers. Hardware vendors only have to write a mini-driver to interact between the GDI and their hardware. The application sends commands to the GDI and the GDI sends commands to the hardware via the mini-driver.

Print drivers are the software that allows an application to communicate with printing devices. Print drivers are composed of three files, which act together as a printing unit.

Print drivers usually are not binary-compatible. This means that each different type of operating system and hardware platform that prints to a printing device has to have a print driver compiled for it. You can't use a Windows 95 print driver on a Windows NT machine, nor can you use a Windows NT 3.51 print driver on a Windows NT 4.0 machine. However, because the core components of NT Workstation and NT Servers are identical, these two operating systems can use the same print drivers, but they have to have the same hardware platform. (In other words, Intel print drivers can't be used for an Alpha.)

Windows NT provides three generic print drivers to support the three basic types of print devices. The three basic types of print devices are raster, PostScript, and plotter. The three generic print drivers are as follows:

The print router routes the print job from the spooler to the appropriate print processor.

The print spooler is a service that actually manages the print process. It's responsible for the following:

The spool file folder is located at %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers folder. To stop and start the spooler service, you can use the Control Panel Service application, or use the NET START SPOOLER or NET STOP SPOOLER command

The print processor completes the rendering process. Rendering is the process of translating print data into a form that a printing device can read. Since each type of client creates print jobs differently, different print server services are required to receive and prepare the jobs. The print processor performs different tasks, depending on the data type. The default data type is Enhanced Metafile for PCL printers and RAW for PostScript printers. Exercise 12-1 explains how to change the default data type.

1. Click Start | Settings | Printers
2. Right-click the printer for which you want to change the default data type
3. Click Properties
4. Click the General tab
5. Click the Print Processor button
6. In the Default Datatype list box, choose the data type
7. Click OK

Windows NT provides two print processors: Windows print processor and Macintosh print processor. Printing device vendors can develop a custom print processor, if needed.

WINPRINT.DLL performs the print processor functions. It supports five data types:

1. EMF: Print jobs received from NT clients are Enhanced Metafiles (EMF). In contrast to RAW printer data being generated by the printer driver, EMF information is generated by the GDI before spooling. After the EMF is created, control returns to the user. The EMF is interpreted in the background on a 32-bit printing subsystem spooler thread and sent to the print driver. Two advantages of EMF are: It returns control of the application to the user more quickly than printer calls can be directly interpreted by the print driver; and EMF files can be printed on any printing device.
2. RAW: Raw files are fully rendered print data, which require no processing from the print processor. Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is an example of a raw data type, because it doesn't need print processor interpretation. EPS files are sent directly to the spooler for routing to the graphics engine.
3. RAW (FF Auto): This type tells the spooler to append a form feed character to the end of each job if it isn't already present. This is used to print the last page on a PCL printing device, if the application doesn't send a form feed.
4. RAW (FF Appended): Like RAW (FF Auto) this data type appends a form feed character to the end of the job. The difference is, it always adds a form feed character even if one is already present.
5. TEXT: Raw text with minimal formatting. The print job is in ANSI text. It uses the printing device's factory defaults for printing the document. This is used for printing devices that can't accept simple text jobs, like PostScript printers.

This print processor (SFMPSPRT) is installed when Services for Macintosh is installed. It supports the PSCRIPT1 data type. It indicates that the print job is level 1 PostScript code, but the printing device isn't a PostScript printer. The images are converted into monochrome raster graphics for printing to the printing device.

Print monitors control access to the printing device, monitor the status of the device, and communicate with the spooler, which relays this information via the user interface. They controls the data going to a printer port by opening, closing, configuring, writing, reading, and releasing the port.

NT has the following print monitors built in:

Print jobs are source code consisting of both data and commands for print processing. All print jobs are classified into data types. The data type tells the spooler what modifications need to be made to the print job so it can print correctly on the printing device.

You can create printers two ways in NT. You can use the Add Printer Wizard or you can use Point and Print. To manage printing, you use the Printers folder. The Add Printer Wizard is located inside the Printers folder. There are three ways to access the Printers folder:

A local printer can be connected directly to a port on your computer or a printing device directly connected on the network. Don't confuse a printing device directly connected to the network with a shared network printer. The reason a printing device connected directly to the network may be a local printer is because your spooler can send jobs directly to the printing device. If the printing device is connected directly to the network, but you first send the print job to a different computer, it is then considered a shared network printer. Exercise 12-2 teaches you how to create a local printer.

1. Open the Printers Folder.
2. Double-click the Add Printer wizard.
3. Choose the My Computer option button. Click Next.
4. Click the check box for the port your printer is connected to (probably LPT1). Click Next.
5. Choose the printer driver by selecting the manufacturer on the left side pane, then select the correct model. If your model doesn't show up on the list, you'll need to click the Have Disk button and supply the path to the driver. Click Next.
6. Give your printer a name (up to 32 characters) and choose whether or not you want it to be the default printer. Click Next.
7. You can now share your printer, but for now make sure Not Shared is chosen. Click Next.
8. Choose Yes to print a test page. Click Next.
9. Click Finish. Make sure your NT Workstation CD is in your CD-ROM drive.

Sharing a printer on the network allows other users to print to a printing device connected to your computer. Users' workstations will first spool the print job to their spooler, then it will be sent to your spooler for final processing and printing.

Before you can share a printer on the network, you first must create it locally on your computer. (See exercise 12-2 for creating a local printer.) You can share the printer when you create it locally, or later after it's already created. Exercise 12-3 will show you how to share a printer on the network after it has already been created locally on your system.

1. Select the Sharing tab in the Printer Properties dialog box.
2. Give it a share name (the default is the first 8 characters of the printer name).
3. Choose what other operating systems will print to this printer. When you do this, NT loads the drivers for each of the selected operating systems, so when users point and print, the driver automatically is copied to their system.
4. Click OK.

To connect to a remote printer on another NT Workstation, you only need to double-click the Printer icon to install that printer on your system (assuming the correct drivers are loaded). This is called Point and Print. Another way is to use the Add Printer wizard. In Exercise 12-4 we'll connect to a remote printer using Point and Print. First, you need to have a printer shared on another Windows NT 4.0 Workstation or server. If it has a different hardware platform, the appropriate driver for your system must be installed on the shared printer's server. (See Exercise 12-3 to share a printer.)

1. Browse the Network Neighborhood and double-click the computer that has the printer you wish to connect to shared.
2. Double-click the printer you wish to connect.
3. NT then starts the Add Printer wizard and installs the printer on your system.

A network printer is a printer that attaches directly to your network. It isn't connected to a computer’s serial or parallel port. NT supports Hewlett-Packard JetDirect cards using the DLC protocol, DEC network printing devices using DECnet or TCP/IP protocols, Lexmark network printing devices with DLC or TCP/IP protocols, and any other device that supports LPD using TCP/IP. You can set printers on all your workstations to print directly to a networked printer, but it is common practice to set up a print server to print to the printers, and share that printer out using NT network shares. This improves performance on the workstations by not requiring additional protocols to be loaded on the clients.

Be sure to understand that Hewlett-Packard JetDirect cards require the DLC protocol to be loaded on your system. DLC is not a routable protocol, so the print server and the printing device must be on the same side of a router.

The options you can configure depend on the printing device you have and the driver that manages it. Some printing devices allow printing on both sides, printing from different paper trays, different fonts, and various other options. These options are configured using the Device Settings tab. Although some options differ from driver to driver, there are several common options that can be configured on all printers. To configure the common options, use the following tabs: General, Ports, Scheduling, Sharing, and Security.

The General tab, shown in Figure 12-2, is used for settting which driver you want to use, describing the printer, and telling network users where it's located. It also allows you to select a separator page, change the print processor, and print a test page.

The separator page, shown in Figure 12-3, is used to identify the start of a print job. It helps users identify where their print job stops, and the next one begins. A separator page also is used to switch between PostScript and PCL printing. By default, NT does not print a separator page. You must first configure a separator file. NT provides three separator files:

Printing a test page prints a document to the printing device. The document lists the .DLLs the print driver uses. Windows NT asks you whether the document printed correctly. If you answer No, a step-by-step Help feature appears, to assist you in troubleshooting the problem.

The Printer Properties Ports tab, shown in Figure 12-4, lets you choose a port for the printer, and allows you to add or delete ports from your system. This is also where you enable printer pooling. The Configure Port button lets you specify the Transmission Retry Timeout setting. This is the amount of time that printer is allowed not to respond, before NT sends the user notification.

Printer pooling is an efficient way to streamline the printing process. It sends print jobs to a pool of printing devices, in which only one printing device actually prints the document. In order to use printer pooling, you need at least two printing devices that can use the same print driver. The printing devices should be located next to each other, since users aren't notified which printing device actually prints the document.

To create a printer pool, check the Enable Printer Pooling check box and select more than one port to print. Be sure the ports you choose have printing devices that use the same print drivers attached.

The Scheduling tab, shown in Figure 12-5, lets you specify the times the printer is available, and allows you to set the printer’s priority. This tab also provides an option to change the way the printer spools.

Your priority choice tells NT which printer gets to print to the printing device first. Printers with higher priority print before printers with a lower priority. The printer priority can be range from 1 (the default) to 99. This does not affect the document priority. It is only useful when you have more than one printer printing to the same printing device. A good use of printer priority would be to give the most important users a printer with the highest priority. Then, for less important users, create another printer that has a lower priority. Set the proper permissions (discussed later) and the important people will be given access to the printing device first.

Be sure to understand that changing the priority of a printer doesn't affect the priority of the print queue. When you use two printers, printing to the same printer device, a printer with a higher priority will print to the device, when it's available, before a printer with a lower priority. If the lower-priority printer is busy printing a document, it finishes printing the job before releasing control to a higher-priority printer.

You can change the spooling options to troubleshoot or speed up your print jobs. The default is optimized for typical print jobs.

Spooling print documents is the default, and normally shouldn't be changed. However, if you are troubleshooting a print problem, it might help to print directly to the printer. If you can print directly to the printer, except when you spool, you probably have a spooling problem. Spooling is more efficient than printing directly to the printer, because the printer and the computer don't have to wait for each other. When you select spooling, you can have the print job start immediately (default) or after the last page is spooled. Printing after the last page is spooled might seem like a better choice than starting immediately, but if a user is sending a big print job, it may take a long time before the printer starts printing. It is more efficient to start printing immediately.

If a print job is sent to the printer that doesn't match the printing device's configuration, it can cause the printer to hang with an error. To prevent this, choose the Hold Mismatched Documents check box. NT will examine the configuration of the print job and the printing device to make sure that they are in sync before sending the print job to the printing device.

By default, NT prints documents on a first-come, first-served basis. By checking the Print Spooled Documents First box, you can have NT print documents that are completely spooled while another document is still spooling, even when the spooling document arrived first.

This keeps the document in the printer’s queue window, even after the print job is finished printing. This allows all users access to see what print jobs have printed.

The Sharing tab, shown in Figure 12-6, is used to share your printer on a network.

The Security tab, shown in Figure 12-7, is where you set permissions for users who print to your printer. It also allows you to enable auditing (if you have auditing turned on in User Manager), and it allows you to take ownership of the printer if you have the proper permissions to do so.

Printers are objects that have access control lists. To set permissions, a user must be an administrator, owner, power user, or a user who has Full Control permissions assigned. At the Printer Permissions window, shown in Figure 12-8, you can assign four types of permissions to printer objects.

The default permissions for printers, both local and shared, are as follows:

Click the Auditing button to audit print events. Figure 12-9 shows the Printer Auditing screen. Just add the users or groups you want to audit, and select which events you want to audit. Audit events show up in the Event Viewer Security Log. Before you can audit, you must turn auditing on using User Manger.

To take ownership of a printer, just click the Ownership button, then click the Take Ownership button. Once you take ownership, you can't give it back.

The Device Setting tab offers various options, depending on which print driver you are using. Figure 12-10 shows the Device Settings tab for an HP LaserJet 5, and Figure 12-11 shows the Device Settings tab for a Cannon BJC-4100.

By default, the creator owner of a print job can manage his own print job. Figure 12-12 depicts what the screen looks like when you manage a print queue. Exercise 12-5 will teach you how to manage a print queue.

1. Double-click the printer you'll print to in the Printers Folder.
2. Choose Printer | Pause Printing on the menu bar. (This is done so the print jobs will remain in the queue for this exercise.)
3. Open a text document on your hard drive using Notepad.
4. Print the document four times.
5. Double-click the Printer icon on the lower-right corner of your task manager to bring up the print queue.
6. Click the second document in the list.
7. On the file menu choose Document | Pause
8. Resume the print job by choosing Document | Resume
9. To remove the print job click Document | Cancel
10. To pause all print jobs in the queue select Printer | Pause Printing. (This is the same thing we did in step 2.)
11. Now repeat step 8 on all jobs in the queue to end this exercise.

If you've worked with computers and networks for any length of time, you know how troublesome printers can be. NT handles printing better than most operating systems, but there can still be problems.

A common problem is the printer spool file located at %systemroot%\system32\printers folder runs out of disk space. To prevent this, make sure the drive the spooler is on has plenty of available space. You should also defragment your hard disk. NT doesn't provide a defrag utility, so you'll need to purchase a third party-program. You can move the default spooler location by editing the Registry. Use extreme caution when editing the Registry. Add the value called DefaultSpoolDirectory with type REG_SZ with the new path to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlset\Control\Print\Printers

You also can change the spool directory for a specific printer by adding the value called DefaultSpoolDirectory with type REG_SZ with the new path to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlset\Control\Print\Printers\<printer>

Where <printer> is the name of the printer you want to change.

After making these changes, you have to stop and restart the spooler service.

If your system crashes while it had a print job in its spool, it tries to complete the print job after the computer restarts. Sometimes when a system crashes the spooled file becomes corrupt and remains in the spool directory. When this happens you'll need to stop the spooler service, go to the spooling directory, and delete the files that won't print. To determine which files are old, check the time date stamp on the files.

If you have NT Workstation acting as a print server and it appears to be running slowly, you can increase the priority of the spooler service. By default, NT Workstation assigns a priority of 7 to the spooler service. To change the priority for the spooler service, you'll have to edit the Registry. Add a value called PriorityClass with type REG_DWORD with the value of the priority you want to the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlset\Control\Print

You also can use the Printer-Troubleshooting wizard. To start the troubleshooting wizard, print a test page and answer No to the question Did the Test Page Print Correctly?

In this chapter you learned that NT refers to printers as the software that manages the process of sending print jobs to the printing device. You learned how the spooler service manages the process of printing. You also learned about print monitors, print drivers, print processors, print routers and print jobs.

I took you through the steps of creating a local printer and connecting to a remote printer. I explained the difference between a network printer that attaches directly to the network, and a shared network printer that prints via a share on an NT Workstation.

We configured printers to use a separator page, changed the default data type, and shared a printer on the network. We also looked at how to apply permissions security and audit printing.

Finally, I explained some troubleshooting techniques you can use to identify print problems, like changing the default spooling folder.

1. What are two advantages of the EMF data type?

   A) It requires less bandwidth to print over the network.

   B) It returns control of the application to the user more quickly.

   C) EMF files can be printed on any printer.

   D) EMF files are in PSCRIPT1 format.

2. What are the two types of print processors shipped with NT?

    

   A) Windows Print Processor (WINPRINT.DLL)

   B) PostScript Print Processor (PSCRIPT1.DLL)

   C) Macintosh Print Processor (SFMPSPRT)

   D) UNIX Print Processor (LPD)

3. If you want to add an HP JetDirect networked printer to your computer, what two things must you do?

    

   A) Install DLC protocol on your computer.

   B) Configure the DLC protocol address on the printer.

   C) Print a test page to get the MAC address of the JetDirect Card.

   D) Install AppleTalk on your computer.

4. You shared an HP LaserJet 5 on your system for everyone in your department to use. When users try to connect to the printer using Windows 95, they get the following error: "The server on which the printer resides does not have a suitable driver installed. Click OK if you wish to select a driver to use on your local machine." What should you do to prevent users from receiving this error message?

    

   A) Share the printer on an NT Server, because Workstation can't provide the correct drivers.

   B) Give them the proper access permissions.

   C) Install an appropriate Windows 95 print driver on your workstation.

   D) Change the default data type to RAW.

    

5. (True/False) A local printer must have a port on your system.

    

6. You want to set up a printer pool using two printers. Neither printing device can use a common driver. How can you enable both printing devices to be in a printer pool?

    

   A) You can set up a printer for each printing device, then add a third printer to manage the two independent printers.

   B) Install DLC protocol to bridge the printing drivers.

   C) Add both printing devices to the Ports Property page and check Enable Printer Pooling.

   D) You can't, because they have to share a common driver.

7. Your boss needs to print to his secretary's printer, but he doesn't want to wait for his print job behind anybody else's print job. How can you share the printer, giving your boss a higher priority?

   A) Share the printer and give him full control of the printer

   B) Set the printer to print directly to the printer.

   C) Create two printers. On one printer give your boss permissions to print, and set the priority to 99. On the second printer give everyone else permissions to print and set the priority to 1.

   D) Create one printer, but share it out twice. On one share give your boss permissions to print, and on the other share give everyone permissions to print.

8. User JamieS sent a print job to an NT Workstation acting as a print server. When she went to the printer to pick up her print job, she noticed a 200-page report was printing out. She didn't want to wait for her print job, so she printed her document on a different printer. JamieS is environmentally conscious, so she doesn't want to waste paper printing the first print job. How can she delete her first print job? (Choose the best answer)

   A) Double-click the Printer icon and select her print job, then press the Delete button.

   B) She should tell the administrator to delete the print job for her.

   C) There is nothing she can do.

   D) She should turn off the printer as soon as the 200-page report finishes printing.

9. To what group must a user be added before he can manage other people's print jobs? (Choose all that apply)

   A) Administrators

   B) Creator Owner

   C) Power Users

   D) Users

10. Drive C: has 10MB of available disk space on it. Drive D: has 300MB of disk space available. Windows NT is installed on Drive C:, which is almost out of space. Sometimes when you print, your computer locks up and you have to restart your system. What should you do to prevent this problem in the future?

    A) Use Disk Administrator to combine the two drives as one logical drive.

    B) Use Explorer and move your WINNT directory to the D: drive.

    C) Move the printer spooler to the D: drive.

    D) Move the print monitor to the D: drive.