Broadcast Printing to Multiple Printers

Wed, 07/18/2012 - 14:23 By Dave Brooks

Multiple printing is easy with RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM).

How we connect to multiple printers

Each print queue in RPM has its own setup. After the print job is transformed as needed, RPM provides multiple actions; every print job is processed by all of these actions.

RPM has a number of action types available, but two are specific to printers: text printing and raw printing.

Windows text printing

RPM handles a number of types of text formatting with the goal of making printed hardcopy just the way you intended it. RPM prints to Windows printers exactly the same way as any other Windows application. Typically when you print from a Windows application, you use the printer settings to select orientation, duplex, etc. Similarly, when you define the text print action, if you use the printer setup RPM will store these settings and use them for the print jobs. This lets you control orientation and other special features—for each and every printer.

Using several text print actions you could easily print to several types of printers at once for each print job. Furthermore, you could:

  • print hardcopy
  • add the print job to your document management system
  • generate a PDF using readily available software such as PDFCreator, or other

all at the same time. All you have to do is add the actions and specify the devices, and be sure to add any particular setup required.

More information:

Raw (printer formatted) printing

RPM can also send print jobs directly to the printer, without going through the normal Windows drivers. We refer to this as "raw" or printer-formatted printing. In order for this to work for multiple printing, each printer needs to be able to use the same format.

When you use the raw print action, you lose the ability to specify features such as orientation and duplex; those commands need to be in the print job when created. RPM can also help you with this. We translate formatted text into PCL, a commonly used printer format for Hewlett-Packard and many other printers. We offer some of this control with our PCL translator, plus we add banner pages, job separators, etc.

More information:

Local and shared printers

RPM supports both local and Windows-shared printers. For shared printers, you need to provide login credentials in the print action setup. Both text and raw print actions will use the login credentials if provided.

We also support interactive printing, which requires the user to be logged in when printing.

More information:

If you need to drive multiple printers: