The VME supports printer devices through the underlying host system. There are three types of printer interfaces: Direct Printers, Shared Printers, and Dedicated Printers.
To use direct printers, the printer interface must be defined in the registry (see VME Server Configuration in the Administrators Guide) before printers can be used. Once the VME Server is started, printers can be added or removed using dev-make -t Printer or dev-remov TCL commands.
The direct printer VME interface does not actually use printers. Printers are not started or stopped from D3. The spooling process sends the output directly to the host system using the printer associated with the assigned Form Queue. The only user or application interfaces are the Form Queue and the Print File. The maximum number of Form Queues and the maximum number of Print Files are defined in the registry.
When using this interface, the printing process is managed completely by the Windows Print Spooler. Therefore, most Spooler commands do not function as expected. Note, however, that the D3 Spooler must be started as usual to allow managing hold files and some other functions. There are no D3 printer processes to activate.
There are a few differences that must be noted:
No Job entry number is displayed.
Print jobs are going directly in the Windows Spooler and must be managed from the Windows Printer Manager. For example, the sp-kill command cannot kill a job being printed in Windows. The listpeqs command shows only job entries spooled to form queues other than the ones described in the registry. Jobs spooled to the form queues mapped to a Windows printer are never stored in the VME Spooler, even if the user used an (h option to the sp-assign command.
Some functionality is not available (alignment, multiple copies) or must be used from the Windows Printer Manager.
The output of the printer process is routed to a Windows printer.
Printers can be activated or removed using dev-make -t NTPrinter or dev-remov associated with Startprinter or Stopprinter.
Note that managing print jobs on a shared printer may require intervention in the Windows Print Manager. Because the output of the D3 printer process is routed to the Windows printer, printing from D3 appears almost instantaneous. Killing a job, for example, requires using the Windows Print Manager. The job name in the printer gives some information about the origin of the print job (see Print File Job ID).
In this mode, a printer is connected to a serial port or a Telnet nailed client or server. The startptr command allows starting a printer on the device. The printer is managed completely by the VME.
The printer cannot be accessed by any other Windows application, including other VME on the network.
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NOTE |
This mode of operation should be restricted to very special usage, because it is not possible to share the printer device. |
See Also