Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

Drag queued print jobs between printers System
I like to print out things at work rather than at home. So when I find something to print and I'm at home, I just stop jobs (in Apps -> Utilities -> Print Center) to the work printer, print to the stopped queue, and then restart the queue when I get to work.

I came back from vacation with a bunch of stuff to print, but found that they had changed network printing from AppleTalk to IP/printserver. So I set up the new printer, but had all of these jobs left over on the old printer.

I was looking for some queue directories so I could drag the job document from one printer queue folder to another (like in OS9). I then found that I could just open the (old) job queue list in Print Center and drag the jobs onto the new printer. This is nothing revolutionary, just a nice feature I didn't know was available.

I don't know what limitations there are if your two printers are vastly different (postscript vs non?), but it works beautifully when they are similar.
    •    
  • Currently 3.67 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (3 votes cast)
 
[4,240 views]  

Drag queued print jobs between printers | 2 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'Drag queued print jobs between printers' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Too bad it doesn't work in Windows
Authored by: krove on Jan 24, '03 01:43:24PM
I love this capability. The idea is so intuitive, dragging from one printer's queue to another's queue.

Unfortunately, when I was at work with my Windows 2K machine, I thought that this would work in Windows. WAS I WRONG! If you have jobs in your print queue on a Win machine, forget about being able to recover them if the printer goes down. So much for MS intuition! (But we all knew they never had any, didn't we?)

[ Reply to This | # ]
Will work on vastly differing printers as well
Authored by: earthy on Jan 29, '03 09:24:29AM

Actually, given the capabilities of CUPS, which is used as the printing system on Mac OS X 10.2 and higher, this will work even across vastly differing printers. So, if you originally print e.g. to a HP DeskJet 500, and then move the job to a queue on a Xerox DocuTech, it should just Do The Right Thing, and translate the data accordingly. Note that you may or may not get more out of the printer you move to than you could out of the printer you originally printed to.

This kinda depends on whether the data printed to the printqueue was directly printer-optimised or not. So, e.g., printing a PDF should result in good-looking output no matter what printer you printed to. However, printing a rendered bitmap will result in the bitmap being printed at the lower resolution of the two printers.



[ Reply to This | # ]