Rewinding print jobs

Can print jobs be restarted on a specific page?

Novell's pserver NLM and EXE have the ability to rewind a print job, however it only rewinds by moving the file pointer back to a previous location in the print job data file. Good success can be obtained by rewinding to the beginning of the print job. Varied success occurs with a specific page/byte offset in the print job.

This task is a bit more difficult than it sounds. With many printer languages (PCL, PostScript) the state of the printer may depend on previous information in the print data. This makes it impossible to simply stop the printer and restart at a specific point in the print job data file.

Text print jobs however can be restarted with some success. Because the print job contains lines of text that can be counted, and the print job record contains the number of lines per page, it is possible to calculate the location in the file where a specific page begins.

Tools that can do this:

In NetWare 4.10, you can use PConsole to rewind a print job. Select the printer, then the printer status, and pick the printer control menu. The rewind print job menu will be at the end of the list.

The QView Pro for Windows product made by Secure Design can also provide this option. Select your print job and click on the printer button. A printer status dialog will be shown with options for rewinding, stopping, pausing and aborting the print job

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