The printers folder allows you to install and administer printers remotely and locally. Using the NT printers folder you can route multiple printers to a single printing device. Remember that in NT a printer is software interface between the application and the printing device. A printing device is the actual hardware device that produces printed output. A printer driver is a program that controls how your computer and your printer interact. With NT, printers can be assigned priorities or configured to print during certain hours. In NT print jobs are sent to a printer. When an NT print job arrives at the printer it is spooled before being sent to a printing device. Spooling is the process of writing the contents of a document to a file on disk. This file is known as the spooling file. In NT the spooler is a service that acts as an interface between the printing application and the print monitor. A physical port is a hardware connection, such as: LPT 1, or COM 2. Both of these are physical connections between local computer and a printing device. A logical port is a network connection to a remote print server or printing device. A print server is a computer that manages printers on a network. The print server can be any station on the network. Network interface printing devices are printing devices with built in network cards, these are connected directly to the network. NT enables you to optimize printing by implementing a printer pool. In a printer pool one printer (software) is connected to multiple printing devices (hardware). All printing devices in the printer pool must be able to use the same printer driver. Some older non-Windows applications are not network aware and expect to print to the standard PC printer port, LPT 1. In such cases you can redirect LPT1 to a network printer. This can be done using the NET USE command at the Dos prompt. For example: NET USE LPT1:\\Server1\Laser1

Setting permissions for printer access and setting up auditing of printer user are essentially security issues, so you should select the Security tab to implement these options. To create a printer you must be logged on as a member of the Administrators, Server Operators, Print Operators, or Power Users groups. Creating a printer is normally the best option in mixed environments where there are different types of print servers and multiple operating systems. Creating a printer (software) is the only way you can print to a local printing device (hardware). Only NT or Windows 95 clients can connect to an NT print server. To connect to a printer only, it requires print privileges. When you connect to a printer (software) you can view all print jobs in the printer window.

Separator files are used to separate print jobs on the printer. Windows NT includes separator files that print a page at the beginning of each document to make it easy for users to find a document among others at the printing device. These pages generally show who submitted the job, when the job printed, what server it printed on and so on. Separator pages are sometimes called header pages, banner pages, or burst pages. NT includes 3 default separator page files. These separator page files are text files and are located in the \winnt_root\system32 directory. You can design your own separator page. Some of the codes you can include in the separator file are: \N which prints the user name of the person who submitted the job. \D prints the date the job was printed. \T prints the time the job was printed. The Windows NT print processor (Winprint.dll) supports journal, text, and raw data types. As with the print processor you should rarely, if ever, have to change this value. When a document is sent to a print pool, the first available printing device in the pool begins to print the document. The printing devices in the pool must be identical or must be able to use the same printer driver. To create a pool of printers, you must use an existing printer or add a new printer. Routing is based on the order in which the ports are chosen. Therefore you should add the faster ports first. All printing devices in the printer pool share the same printer name and act as a single printing device. Pausing the printer pauses the entire printer pool. There is no limit to the number of printing devices that can be added to an NT printer pool. You can set the hours when a printer is available. Priorities range from 1 to 99 and 99 is the highest priority. If you select the Print directly to the printer radio button, you can bypass spooling and print directly to the printer. However you will have to wait until the document is printed before continuing to work with your application. This option is not available when a printer is shared. When you purge a printer, you remove all documents waiting to be printed or that have printed. If you have selected the Keep documents after they have printed checkbox. The share name of the printer should be no more than 8 characters, optionally followed by a period and one to three characters and should not contain spaces. There are 4 printer permissions under the security tab, these are: No access, Print, Manage Documents, and Full Control.

In NT, printing components are stored on the hard disk and configuration information is stored in the Registry. On the hard disk NT stores printing components in the folder \winnt_root\system32\spool. There is a separate sub folder for each platform. For example, Intel drivers are stored in a W32X86 folder. MIPS drivers are stored in a W32MIPS folder and Alpha drivers are stored in the W32ALPHA folder. As with the drivers folder there is a separate folder for each platform. NT stores configuration information about printing components in the registry. The NT print monitor takes care of several auxiliary tasks. These include: Looking for unsolicited error messages, such as "our of toner" handling true end of job notification. The print monitor waits until the printer has the last page of the print job and then tells the spooler that the job is finished and can be deleted.

NT comes supplied with 4 print monitors: LOCALMON.DLL, HPMON.DLL, DECPSMON.DLL, and LPRMON.DLL. LOCALMON handles output for LPTx, COMx, file:, remote print shares, and named pipes. LOCALMON.dll is located in the winnt\system32 directory. HPMON handles output to Hewlett Packard (HP) network interface printing devices. It is located in the winnt\system32 directory. HPMON by default can support up to 64 HP network interface printing devices, however it can support up to 225. To use HPMON.DLL and HP network interface printing devices, the Data Link Control (DLC) protocol must be installed on the print server. Neither the DECPSMON or LPRMON is installed unless you setup printers which require them. Depending on the printer selected, NT uses either the TCP/IP or DECnet protocol to send data to these printers. The LPR print monitor allows NT to print directly to UNIX LPD, print servers or network interface printing devices. Some times garbled or non appearing print jobs could be a result of your print processor not handling the data type you are trying to print. You should also check and make sure your print processor isn't corrupt.