Jobs getting logged twice in PaperCut

“Help! I’m a PaperCut Administrator and I’ve noticed that some print jobs seem to show up twice in the Job Log. Why does this happen and how can we prevent it?”

Why would print jobs be logged twice in PaperCut?

We have heard of rare cases where ‘double jobs’ or ‘duplicate jobs’ being logged by PaperCut under Logs > Job Log when printing from the Edge Browser or other Windows 10 Store Applications.

So far we’ve only heard of this happening when a narrow set of conditions are met:

• The user prints a document from a Windows 10 Store apps like the Edge browser, Microsoft Reader, Maps, or Photos to a shared out print queue on a Windows server.
• And the print queue on the server is not configured to use Client Side rendering.

When these conditions are met, Windows will use a process to render the print job called XPS2GDI which results in two spool files instead of the usual one.

Because of this, we found that users could be charged twice for the same job. Thankfully, there are two ways to fix this issue.

Solution A: Upgrade your version of PaperCut

Since PaperCut version 17.0.6 we’ve changed things up to watch out for this special scenario and make sure these jobs are only tracked once. Please upgrade your PaperCut server to 17.0.6 or later if you are encountering this issue.

Solution B: Make sure Client-Side Rendering is enabled

You can prevent print jobs from spooling in the XPS2GDI format by having Windows clients print using Client-Side Rendering. We also like Client-Side Rendering for a number of other reasons, like the fact that it helps reduce the load on your print server.

In this article we describe a few different ways to set up your Windows printing system to ensure Client Side Rendering is used.

Still have questions?

Let us know! We love chatting about what’s going on under the hood. Feel free to leave a comment below or visit our Support Portal for further assistance.