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Windows 7 : Managing Print Jobs (part 1)

9/22/2013 9:28:02 PM

1. How Printing Works

When you print a document, quite a bit of work takes place invisibly in the background before the printer even "knows" there's a document to print. First, a program called a print spooler (or spooler for short) makes a special copy of the document that contains instructions that tell the printer exactly what to do. Those instructions don't look anything like the document you're printing. They're just codes that tell the printer what to do so that the document it spits out ends up looking like the document that you printed.

After the spooler creates the special printer file, it can't just hand the whole thing off to the printer as one giant set of instructions. Most printers are slow mechanical devices that can hold only a small amount of information at a time in a buffer. The buffer is a storage area within the printer that holds the data to be printed until it is printed. The amount of data that can reside in the buffer depends on the size of the buffer. In some cases, the buffer will hold a large number of pages. In others, it might only hold a single page, or in the case of a complex document such as a photo, and a relatively small buffer, only part of the page might fit in the buffer at one time.

Furthermore, when the spooler has finished creating the special printer file, there may be another document already printing. There may even be several documents waiting to be printed. So, the spooler has to put all the print jobs into a queue (line). All of this activity takes computer time (not your time, per se). And because each document has to be fed to the printer in small chunks, there's often time for you to do things like cancel documents you've told Windows to print but that haven't yet been fully printed.

To manage those print jobs, you use the print queue. If a document is already printing, or waiting to print, you'll see a tiny printer icon in the Notification area. When you point to that icon, the number of documents waiting to be printed appears in a tooltip, like the example shown in Figure 1. Double-click that small icon to open the print queue.

Figure 1. Printer icon in the Notification area.

As an alternative to using the Notification area, you can get to the print queue from the Devices and Printers folder.

  • Click the Start button and click Devices and Printers on the right side of the menu (if that option is available).

  • Tap , type prin, and click Devices and Printers under the Control Panel heading.

  • Click the Start button and choose Control Panel => View Devices and Printers.

Once you're in the Printers folder, double-click the printer's icon to open its print queue.

To make a desktop shortcut to a specific printer, right-click the printer's icon in Devices and Printers and choose Create Shortcut. Any time you need to open the printer's queue, just double-click (or click) that shortcut icon on the desktop.


2. Managing Print Jobs

The print queue for a printer contains all the documents that are currently printing or waiting to print. Figure 2 shows an example where I've already told Windows to print two documents. The first document I sent is currently printing. The other is waiting in line for its turn.

Figure 2. Sample documents in a print queue.

2.1. Managing a single document

To pause or cancel a specific print job, right-click its line in the print queue and choose one of the following options from the shortcut menu that appears:

  • Pause: Stops printing the document until you restart it.

  • Restart: Restarts the paused print job.

  • Cancel: Cancels the print job so that it doesn't print and removes the job from the print queue.

  • Properties: Provides detailed information about the print job. You can also set the document's priority. The higher the priority, the more likely the print job is to butt in line ahead of other documents waiting to be printed.

2.2. Managing several documents

To pause, restart, or cancel several documents in the queue, select their icons. For example, click the first job you want to change. Then, hold down the Shift key and select the last one. Optionally, you can select (or deselect) icons by holding down the Ctrl key as you click. Then, right-click any selected item, or choose Document from the menu bar, and choose an action. The action will be applied to all selected icons.

2.3. Managing all documents

You can use commands on the print queue's Printer menu, shown in Figure 3, to manage all the documents in the queue without selecting any items first. The options that apply to all documents are as follows:

  • Pause Printing: Pause the current print job and all those waiting in line.

  • Cancel All Documents: You guessed it — this cancels the current print job and all those waiting to be printed.

How Do I Stop This Thing?

Don't expect a paused or canceled print job to stop right away. Several more pages may print, even after you've canceled a print job. That's because the print queue sends chunks of a document to the printer's buffer. That buffer, in turn, holds information waiting to be printed. Canceling a print job prevents any more data from being sent to the buffer, but the printer won't stop printing until its buffer is empty (unless, of course, you just turn the printer off).


Figure 3. Printer menu in the print queue.

2.4. Changing print queue order

In the print queue, you can change the order in which documents in the queue will print. For example, if you need a printout right now, and there's a long line of documents waiting ahead of yours, you can give your document a higher priority so it prints sooner. In other words, your print job gets to butt in line ahead of others.

To change an item in the print queue's priority, right-click the item in the queue and choose Properties. On the General tab of the dialog box that opens, drag the Priority slider, shown in Figure 4, to the right. The farther you drag, the higher your document's priority. Click OK. Your document won't stop the document that's currently printing, but it may well be the next one to print.

Figure 4. Priority slider in a print queue item's Properties dialog box.

You can close the print queue as you would any other window — by clicking the Close button in its upper-right corner or by choosing Printer => Close from its menu bar. To get help with the print queue while it's open, choose Help from its menu bar.

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