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Notes on printing in a network
Network printer availability
By default, List & Label first attempts to determine whether a printer is available on the system before attempting to communicate with it for the first time. This is usually advantageous in the case of network printers when a project is used within a network but the printer used for the project is not available to all workstations. If the printer is used without checking in such a case, attempts to access an unavailable printer will result in delays in printing, as network timeouts of 20-30 seconds may occur. In such a case, the prior check is advantageous because List & Label quickly determines that the printer is not available at the local workstation and switches to the default printer.
If you are sure that the printer is accessible from all workstations (or should be accessible), you can suppress the check by setting the option LL_OPTION_NOPRINTERPATHCHECK to “True”. By setting this option, you can also slightly improve the printing speed in this case. The default setting for this option is “False”.
Further information about this option can be found in the Programmer’s Reference.
Timeouts and caching
Printer-specific settings (printer device contexts) are usually cached. This is generally beneficial for performance reasons. However, if the network connection is interrupted in the meantime, caching can lead to unexpected behavior. In addition, there are printers that only start printing after the printer device context has been closed, in which case printing would actually take longer for the user. In these cases, caching can be disabled by setting the following option:
define LL_OPTION_PRINTERDCCACHE_TIMEOUT_SEC (214 ) /\* default: 60 (0 → no cache) \*/
Further information about this option can be found in the Programmer’s Reference.
Remote Desktop Connection (RDP)
Local printers (and thus always all local network printers) can be redirected via RDP (mstsc.exe), whereby the locally configured default printer is also used. Further details on configuration and alternatives are described in the Microsoft article Configure printer redirection over the Remote Desktop Protocol.
Printer redirection of the local printer via RDP can lead to significant delays and, in exceptional cases, to timeouts. As described in the Microsoft article, local network printers are also redirected, which means that in extreme cases, a printer may experience “double” redirection, first via RDP and then to the network printer. If long waiting times or timeouts occur during printing, the redirection of network printers should be disabled in the settings of the Remote Desktop Connection, at least on a trial basis.
Network printers and web services
If a printer is not displayed in the context of the web service, this could be because the Windows user cannot see the available printers. You should therefore first check under which Windows user the web service was started and whether this user has access to the requested (network) printer. The Windows user can be customized via the service or the web server. When using Internet Information Services (IIS), for example, the user can be customized via the application pool in Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
General information
If project files are used by different users/workstations at the same time and stored on a network drive, conflicts may arise due to files having the same name. The same applies to saving printer settings in the so-called P file (printer settings file) of List & Label. A more detailed description and what can be done about this can be found in the Programmer’s Reference.