Printer   - Print channel -

Once you have created a new print channel or if you just like to change the printer and after-print settings, you will come back here to this part of the setup categories.

The printer configuration one of  the two mandatory setup tasks you have to complete before a print channel can be launched for operation.

NOTE: As the optional Graphics processing configuration directly depends on the printer properties, it is highly recommended performing the printer configuration always first.

NOTE: Like during the most setup work you can let the main application (or the service) keep running all printing jobs. The new or modified channel will be restarted after you have saved all settings.

STEP 1 - Open the Printer & After print tab in the AutoPrint - Setup area:

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STEP 2 - Select a printer

This will be the place where AutoPrint is looking for new input files for printing

 1  Select a printer for output
The list contains all printers installed under your current Windows account.

Make sure to select a normal printer, that does not open any dialogue screen during the print process. Especially, if AutoPrint is being prepared to run as a print service, there is normally no user interaction.

 2  Printer information panel
The panel shows all important properties of the currently selected printer configuration.
The head line informs about the printer accessibility. Unless the printer is offline, the top-left light should turn green soon.

If the Windows printer/driver settings, which correspond to those of the logged-in user, are OK for this print channel, selecting the printer already completes the required configuration in this section.

 
- Options -    The following further items are set to default values or left empty. They can be optionally modified to support special use cases.

 3  Detailed printer settings

The printer/driver can be configured individually for each print channel, i.e. you may define several print channels to the same physical printer, but with different configurations, like paper trays, resolutions or number of copies and more.
Clicking this button will lead you to the existing Windows printer/driver dialogue. Once you close the dialogue with ‘OK’, the new configuration will be attached to the print channel.

 4  Adopt user defaults

If you have modified the printer/driver configuration recently and you now prefer to adopt your default configuration, just click here.

 5  Paper size control

Some printers, like label printers or rotating printers, allow the control of the output paper size or can be configured to handle non-standard paper sizes. If the selected printer belongs to this group, the relevant dimensions are enabled and can be entered here.

 6  Pages to be printed

If you need to print only a group of pages of a large document type, you can define the start page and the last page number to be printed.

 7  Copies

There are two areas where the number of copies can be defined: the Detailed printer settings (see item 3 above) or here in this number field.
While the first one is managed by the printer driver, the second one is managed by the print channel by printing each page multiple times before going to the next page, and so on.

 8  After print

Per default the input file is deleted after a successful print job. If you prefer to move the file to a different folder you can configure this here.

 9  Pause print channel after each print job

The print channel kernel is designed for maximum speed in high-throughput systems. If your environment contains lower performance components or limited remote connections, it may be helpful to add some delay after each print job.

 10  Backup print channel

For improving the overall reliability of a productive printing solution, you can enable a backup print channel. Just assign an already defined, active print channel by its number. Once an unexpected printer issue occurs on the original print channel - for example due to the paper or toner supply or during temporary network faults - AutoPrint will redirect the print job to the chosen backup print channel.

NOTE: For the safe detection of an eventual issue, just accept AutoPrint taking some extra seconds for monitoring the printer spooler work progress.