Establishing Printers

There are two ways to establish a printer in Print Manager. Which you should use depends on the location of the print device relative to the computer on which you are establishing the printer.

• To establish a printer for a print device directly attached to your Windows NT-based computer, use the Create Printer command from the Printer menu.

  With this method, you choose the printer driver you want, and then set the initial driver configuration. Thereafter, jobs from locally-run Windows-based applications are assigned the journal data type. In practical terms, this means that applications will regain control quickly after printing; a marked improvement over the way Windows 3.1 manages print jobs. For more information on the data types such as journal, see "Data Types" later in this chapter.

• To establish a printer for a network print server that your Windows NT-based computer sends print jobs to, use the Connect To Printer command from the Printer menu.

  When you use this method, print jobs spool on the print server, not on the local Windows NT-based computer. Jobs sent from locally-run Windows-based applications are assigned the RAW data type, which means that the application does not regain control until the print job is fully rendered. (This situation is essentially the same situation as when using Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups 3.11).

  If the network print server you establish a connection to runs Windows NT, the server automatically downloads the proper printer driver to your computer. This saves you the trouble of installing the driver manually and keeps you from accidentally choosing the wrong driver. If the print server does not run Windows NT, then Print Manager prompts you to manually install the printer driver.

The following table summarizes the differences between using the Create and Connect To commands.

Table 6.1 Using the Create Printer and Connect To Printer Commands