Printing To File

[Guest]

Hi,
Somehow my printer setup , which is shared from another PC, got confused and
changed it's name to "Auto Printer Name". Before noticing it, I had sent
several jobs to the printer but they will not print. I added back the shared
printer and printing is okay now. Problem is, how do I get the print jobs
moved from the incorrect printer to the new printer setup? I tried changing
to "Auto Printer Name" to the same port normally used by the shared printer
but that did not help. I tried using the Print to File option but I have to
enter a name for ever print job in the queue. Since I have 500+ files in the
queue, it'd take forever. Is there a way to send the jobs to a files without
having to name each? I do not care about file name, just do not want to have
to delete the files.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dieter]

Hi,

I suppose the print jobs are still in the queue of the incorrect
printers. At a first step, save the spl files from the
"%systemroot%\system32\spool\printers" path. If something goes wrong,
you can later print them again with my splviewer or the emf spool file
viewer from codeproject.
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/EMFSpoolViewer.asp

Download splviewer from my homepage
http://www.lvbprint.de/bin/current/SplViewSetup.exe
Sorry it is german but not difficult to use (supports drag/drop for
spl-files).
After starting use the second button from left with the "J". It shows
you all print jobs for all local printers. If the last column "Datentyp"
shows "RAW" you are finished. The saved spool are in raw format. You can
send them to the new printer (with splview or command line "copy /b" or
one of the many tools which can do that).
If it shows something with "EMF" you can preview the jobs in splview or
print multiple jobs with the button "Jobs drucken" to the new printer.
This works for the freeware version with all documents with less than
300 pages. If you have bigger documents let me know.

Another possiblity could be to disable the "Enable Advanced printing
feature" in the printer properties, "advanced" tab. Then all jobs are
spool in the raw format. But since your jobs are already in EMF format
you perhaps won't succeed in converting them. (That is perhaps an idea
in the future. You can even set a per printer spool path in the registry
"SpoolDirectory" entry in the printer section.
e.g.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers\TestPrinter
then it is easier to find the jobs, which belong to a specific printer.)

One more possibility, which I have not tried but was mentioned in some
earlier posts is to enable printer pooling for the new and the old
printer. Normally the job will be printed to the printer, which port is
active. Perhaps this would be the easiest solution, if the drivers are
the same.

Dieter