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How to get a print job from...

Introduction
You want to to see if Print Wizard will work for you, but first you have to figure out the plumbing; that is, how to get print data from your existing application (or one you're about to write) into Print Wizard. There's so many options!!! Let's see if we can narrow it down.

If your app runs on Unix, Linux, AIX, etc.

The most feature-rich way to do it is to treat a Windows PC as a print server. Configure a remote printer on Unix (or whatever). That means giving it a destination IP address and a queue name. The IP address is the IP address of the PC. You can make up a queue name. Then in Print Wizard Service Edition, (PWSE), define an LPD service with that same queue name. Your app sends data to Unix, Unix sends it (via the LPR/LPD protocol) to the PC, PWSE receives, and passes it to Printwiz.exe to print it.

A slight variation is to use the JetDirect or "listen" protocol.

Or if you have a way to have your Unix-based app place a file where the PC can see it (such as a Samba share), do that. In PWSE define a despool service to print whatever shows up there.

Finally, there the FTPDespool service, which keeps checking an FTP server to see if anything needs printing.

If your app runs in Windows

Here you will generally set up a virtual printer driver, that will use some PCL-5 driver (whose output Print Wizard can understand). For the plumbing you configure a standard TCP/IP port, of type LPD, with a queue name you make up. For the IP address, tell it localhost (or its numeric equivalent, 127.0.0.1), meaning "this same machine". In Print Wizard Service Edition, set up an LPD service with the same queue name. Now your app writes to the Windows printer driver, which converts it to PCL-5 and sends it via LPR/LPD to the same machine, where PWSE gets it, and passes it to printwiz.exe to print it.

A slight variation is the raw protocol, which meshes with PWSE's listen service.

There are other ways, of course

You can passthrough-print using your terminal emulator. You can create a file directly and tell Print Wizard to print it. You can drag and drop. You can tell Print Wizard to print from a web server.

So many options... Contact us if you're flummoxed.
 

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