Printing in Windows

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 2:58 pm

Something that seems so simple sure isn't!

Can anyone offer any tips as to how to manage huge print queues? Right now when someone batch prints my application just loops through and calls the print function of a library I'm using. This is fine, except when the batch print contains hundreds of documents. With bigger print jobs it seems like some get lost in the shuffle.

Can anyone suggest a way to make sure that everything I need to print gets printed?

TerryHough · Post by **TerryHough** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 6:23 pm

What OS? Seems to me there may be a problem in WinXPHome.

Recently I have been struggling with a failure of the WinXPHome print
spooler losing data. Works correctly occasionally, but fails most of the
time. One it fails, it never works again correctly until the system is
rebooted.

Same program and data runs correctly on Win98SE and WinXPPro without
any problems

All OS versions used the same printer with appropriate driver for the
printer installed.

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 6:30 pm

It has happened on a variety of OSes from 98 to XP Pro, so I can't nail it down to a single system. It is rather hard to debug because I can't reproduce the problem (and I don't have a 500 invoice batch I can print!)..

Tommeh · Post by **Tommeh** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 6:41 pm

Have you tried printing using the API?

Try printing with API and see if it works, but i've done printing before, and it worked fine on XPpro/2003

TerryHough · Post by **TerryHough** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 6:42 pm

I would suggest you have your user set the printer options to "Print directly to Printer" to bypass the print spooler and start the batch.

If it still loses invoices, then you have isolated it to your software (or the library functions you are using).

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 8:33 pm

Sadly I don't think many customers will stop to take the time to even ask, much less want to change their printer's configuration.. Sooner or later I'll find a solution!

dell_jockey · Post by **dell_jockey** » Tue Mar 22, 2005 7:39 pm

Mitch,

I've had similar problems with other apps. It turned out that the drive/directory that should store the pending printing job files wasn't large enough. If your customers have print servers that spool somewhere to drive C, chances are that the C-partition is not large enough...

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Tue Mar 22, 2005 7:44 pm

Nope, I have a terabyte of storage available here and I see the problems pretty regularly. It is something internal to IE's printing (dys)functions..

I've abandoned my quest for a solution here and have moved on to something more reliable - PDF printing. Using the iSedQuickPDF library it is pretty easy..