Hello,
I've been searching online for a few hours now and can't seem to find the
information I'm looking for. I want to understand how the windows printer
queue works.
I use a utility called PrintFile to send plotter ready files to the
plotter. There are lots of similar utilities that are just a replacement
for an applications print command. Windows copies the file into a spool
directory and starts to stream it across to the plotter. I can stack up
the files in the spooler until I run out of disk space, and they will
eventually get plotted.
Its a suboptimal process for a couple of reasons. One is that the plot
files are large (~200 Mb), and if I want multiple copies the spooler
makes a file that is just the individual file repeated (ie a 200 MB plot
with 7 copies results in a 1.4GB file on the spooler). Loading up the
plotters with a night or a weekend's worth of plotting can suck up a lot
of disk space, which has filled the disk and created havoc on occasion
when we weren't paying attention. The second annoyance is that the files
and the spooler live on the server, which means that when sending a plot
to the plotter from my desktop the whole file makes a round trip. When
several people are plotting the whole network gets sluggish.
I would like to take control of that process programmatically, and
provide another file to the spooler whenever the queue gets empty. Maybe
it is even possible to have the plot spooler plot the file from where it
lives and solve both problems.
I can already here people telling me that disk space is cheap, and it is,
but the whole process offends me and I would like to fix it. The other
issue is that the windows plot spooling process doesn't work that well to
start with. Deleting a plot in windows can get really ugly sometimes.
Maybe I can build a better mousetrap.
So... can anyone point me in the right direction? I imagine this is all
described somewhere, but I just can't seem to come up with the right
search terms.
Thanks
Marc Pelletier
