Basic Printing Testing

PaperCut software is designed to be installed on top of your existing site printing environment. Printing devices should already be working and users should be able to print to server print queues from their Linux, Macintosh or Windows workstations prior to installing & testing our software.

Printing problems are usually caused by a device print driver that produces unexpected results. To test, create a new print queue using a different print driver than the existing one. If the new print driver works better, delete the former print queue and use the newly created print queue instead. If this is a Find-Me Printing scenario with multiple destination print queues, test by redirecting to only one destination queue at a time to test each individual destination print queue driver.

Caution: Windows server print queues have a setting that determines whether raw metadata format is altered by Windows when passed to a print queue. We recommend that you disable the proprietary EMF option and instead use the generic RAW format.

Print Testing Steps

Verify that printing already works at a site prior to installing our software:
Disable our Print Provider service to bypass our software completely to verify normal printing functions.

Enable our services and print through the server’s print queue, using the server print driver:
This will verify our Print Provider service job tracking functions.

Print Job Ownership

To verify any print job owner, pause the printer queue and have the user send a print job. Next, look at the paused print queue for ownership of that job. If the print job owner is Guest or some Generic account, we will not track that print job. Our software must be given unique user credentials at Login to track copy, fax, print or scan jobs. There’s more information here on Print Jobs not getting tracked.

Virtual Queues

Virtual queue print drivers format the print job and redirect the formatted spool file to the destination print queue. To test the physical printer’s print driver, you can bypass any virtual queue and print directly to the destination print queue.