Compatible Print-IT printers

Hi Tiago,

A list of printers that don't work would be a lot shorter. But seriously, most printers will work but there are some limitations and a few rare exceptions.

What is supported also depends on the type of UPD printing, whether its UPD to client printer-attached or UPD to a network print share.

Printing to a client printer allows you to optionally intercept the EMF print stream print job and set additional printer properties (stapling, collation, zoom etc) peculiar to the OEM native printer drivers. This supports all printer capabilities and almost all printers.

Things are somewat more restricted with regard to supporting printer capabilities when you're printing to a network print share, and this includes both the remote print relay and print server extensions.

A UPD print queue doesn't have any information about functionality provided by custom resource DLLs in the target printer drivers. As with other UPD products, the Print-IT universal printer driver (UPD) gets it's printer information from the Windows printer properties of the target printer, for example under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\printers\Printer_queue_name\DsDriver. If it isn't defined under Dsdriver on the native network print queue, you don't get it in the UPD queue.

Microsoft printer drivers translate perfectly to a UPD queue, even supporting stapling, but some OEM drivers add a lot of resource DLLs to do all sorts of other things that won't translate to the UPD queue capabilities. The extras aren't supported which then raises the question of whether that particular printer is supported or not. It is as a printer, but if it uses resource DLLs for stapling and collation and that's critical for you, then I guess the printer is unsupported.

Makes the whole definition of supported or not a bit difficult. If all you want to do is print, almost everything is supported, if other functions are critical to your perception that the printer is supported, then there are certainly unsupported printers, mostly high-end MFPs with additional post-print capabilities.

regards,

Rick

Thanks for the enlightments, Rick.

I was asking that because I had a very weard behavior with Print-IT in one of my customers.

We are using Quest Universal Print Server to distribute some shared printers to vworkspace users.

The print server is a Windows Server with a bunch of printers regularly installed on it.

I than installed the Print Server Extensions on it to distribute printers through vWorkspace Mgmt Console. Everything worked just fine.

When I login in a VDI session I get the correct mapping for printers using the Quest Universal Print Driver. I even can print the page test successfully, but when I send a job from Microsoft Word 2010 to that printer, I check the queue in the print server and the job is there with a "spooling" status and the weird behavior of the size of the job growing infinitely and never get printed.

I thought it could be some incompatibility between Quest UP Driver and the printer native driver. The printer is a OKI MB480 from OkiData.

Have you seen this before? Maybe the Quest UP driver is getting lost on compression algorithms or something like that...

Cheers,

Tiago Baeta

Hi Tiago,

Sorry for the slow response, I've been a bit busy.

Microsoft developed a printer driver standard with Windows 2000 server, which for PCL used a standard (Microsoft Unidriver) engine, printer descriptor files and supported manufacturer-provided resource DLLs for additional functionality. The unidriver compliant printer driver is characterised by it's descriptor file which has a .gpd (PCL etc) and .ppd (postscript) file extension. Many but not all printer manufacturers have unidriver compatible printer drivers.

The OKI MB480 isn't a unidriver compatible PCL driver though that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I've just tried it in my lab (english version of MB480 PCL driver, created local queue nul: on print server, created UPD queue to local queue share) and it appears to behave itself. What is the print server operating system? I've tried server 2003 (x86) and Server 2008 (x86) successfully.

regards,

Rick

I would love if we could have a sticky thread where people write down their experience with different printer models along with any issues's they have encountered.  For me, functionality means, color vs B/W working, Duplex, Landscape, etc

Right now, for instance I have the following issue:

Ricoh Africo 6501 - full printing funcrtionality (color vs B/W working, Duplex, Landscape. Paper sizes)

Ricoh Africo C5000 - basic printing only (no landscape, duplex, legal paper selection)

HP color Laserjet 2940 - Required updated client drivers (if you call 2005 drivers updated) in order to print color.  All other functionality working.

HP DesignJet T610 - Appears to be working.  Creating cutom printer sizes locally and refreshing cache allows Redirected printer to print to these custom sizes.  Note: Image Scaling is slightly different between Redirected and Native but still workable.

A list similar to this would REALLY help us with new implementations and also when it comes time to purchase a new printer..least its not a complete shot in the dark as to what is going to happen.