Track Printing

PaperCut is designed to track and record printing in many different network environments. When people refer to “tracking” they usually mean in a silent non-obtrusive way. PaperCut NG is perfect for this, and has a free 40-day trial so that you can test it out for yourself.

Our products keep detailed activity logs of all user printing including information such as:

1. The user who printed
2. The time of printing
3. The number of pages printed (page count)
4. Document attributes such as color, duplex, grayscale, paper size and document area
5. Where the print job originated from (the workstation name or IP address)
6. The document name and type (for example a Word document’s file name)
7. The print job’s cost if a per-page or other cost model is associated with the printer
8. The full print job contents including interactive viewing, if Print Archiving is enabled.

This information can be further analyzed by network administrators to determine printer load and abnormal network/printer activity.

Yes. If PaperCut’s print archiving feature is enabled, it’s possible to interactively view print jobs. This works by archiving a copy of the printer spool file. Viewing technology such as Ghost Trap is used to convert the spool files into images and these can be viewed interactively in any web browser.

Nope! In addition to tracking printing, PaperCut MF and NG and PaperCut Pocket and Hive can also enable easy printing, provide security and cut down on waste! Check out the feature comparison page for the low down on which product can help you do which tasks.

The most likely explanation is that the PaperCut Print Provider service is not running. This Windows system service is best described as the main print job tracker or print job monitoring component and is responsible for monitoring all print activity on the server’s print queues. This service may have been accidentally stopped. A common cause of this is that the system administrator manually stops/starts the print spooler service, and hence the services that depend on it are not restarted. System services can be accessed via Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services. It is important that the PaperCut Print Provider is running at all times.

It’s also worth taking a look through the Printing not getting tracked troubleshooting article, which has a number of things that you can check to see what might be going wrong!

1. Check out the Discovery section on Printing Visibility, Reporting and Logging for more information.
2. Try out a demo for yourself over at demo.papercut.com - head into the ‘Reports’ tab to see example print reports.
3. When you’re ready, download PaperCut NG and take it for a spin yourself!

Yes! PaperCut Software offers a free Windows print logging program - the program works by saving a log of all print activity in HTML and Excel/CSV format. The simple features of this program may fit the simple logging requirements of some system managers. More information on the free print logger is available on our free software page.