Chapter 26
Managing Print Jobs
When you print a document, more happens than you might expect. The printer doesn't immediately start printing. Instead, the computer converts your document to a set of instructions that tells the printer what to do. Then those printer instructions are sent to the printer in small chunks because the printer is a slow mechanical device compared to a computer.
Each document you print becomes a print job that waits its turn in line if other documents are already printing, or waiting to be printed. Most of this activity takes place in the background; you don't have to do anything to make it happen. In fact, you can continue using your computer normally while the document is printing.
How Printing Works
When you print a document, quite a bit of work takes place invisibly in the background before the printer even “knows” it has a document to print. First, a program called a print spooler (or spooler for short) makes a special copy of the document containing instructions for the printer. Those instructions don't look anything like the document you're printing. They're codes that tell the printer what to do so that the document it spits out looks like the document you printed.
After the spooler creates the special printer file, it can't hand the whole thing off to the printer as one giant set of instructions. Most printers are slow mechanical devices that can hold only a small amount of information at a time in a buffer. The buffer is a storage area within the printer that holds the data until it's printed. The amount of data that can reside in the buffer depends on the size of the buffer. In some cases, the buffer holds a large number of pages. In others, it may hold only a single page. If you're printing a complex document such as a photo, and the buffer is relatively small, only part of the page may fit in the buffer at one time.
When the spooler has finished creating the special printer file, another document may already be printing. You may even have several documents waiting to be printed. So, the spooler puts all the print jobs into a queue (line). All this activity takes the computer time. And because each document is fed to the printer in small chunks, you often have time to cancel a document you've told Windows to print but that hasn't been fully printed.
To manage print jobs, you use the print queue. If a document is already printing, or waiting to print, you see a tiny printer icon in the notification area. When you point to that icon, the number of documents waiting to be printed appears in a tooltip. Double-click that small icon to open the print queue as shown in Figure 26.1. (We set the printer offline to catch the item in queue.)
Figure 26.1 The printer queue.
As an alternative to using the notification area, you can get to the print queue from the Devices and Printers folder. To open your Devices and Printers folder, press Windows+X, click Control Panel, and click View Devices and Printers.
After you're in the Devices and Printers folder, double-click the printer's icon to open its print queue.
Managing Print Jobs
The print queue for a printer contains all the documents that are currently printing or waiting to print. In the example in Figure 26.1, one document has been sent to the printer and is being spooled for printing.
Managing a single document
To pause or cancel a specific print job, right-click its line in the print queue and choose one of the following options from the shortcut menu that appears:
- Pause: Stops printing the document until you restart it.
- Resume: Resume restarts the paused print job.
- Restart: Restarts the paused print job.
- Cancel: Cancels the print job so that it doesn't print and removes the job from the print queue.
- Properties: Provides detailed information about the print job. You can also set the document's priority. The higher the priority, the more likely the print job is to cut in line ahead of other documents waiting to be printed.
Managing several documents
To pause, restart, or cancel several documents in the queue, select their icons. For example, click the first job you want to change. Then hold down the Shift key and select the last one. Optionally, you can select (or deselect) icons by holding down the Ctrl key as you click. Then right-click any selected item, or choose Document from the menu bar, and choose an action. The action is applied to all selected icons.
Managing all documents
You can use commands on the print queue's Printer menu, shown in Figure 26.2, to manage all the documents in the queue without selecting any items first. The following options apply to all documents:
- Pause Printing: Pause the current print job and all those waiting in line. See the section “Printing Offline,” later in this chapter, for an example of when this would be useful.
- Cancel All Documents: You guessed it — this cancels the current print job and all those waiting to be printed.
Figure 26.2 The Printer menu in the print queue.
Changing the print queue order
In the print queue, you can change the order in which documents in the queue print. For example, if you need a particular printout right now, and a long line of documents is waiting ahead of it, you can give your document a higher priority so it prints sooner. Your print job gets to cut in line ahead of others.
To change an item in the print queue's priority, right-click the item in the queue and choose Properties. On the General tab of the dialog box that opens, drag the Priority slider, shown in Figure 26.3, to the right. The farther you drag, the higher your document's priority. Click OK. Your document doesn't stop the document that's currently printing, but it may be the next one to print.
Figure 26.3 The Priority slider in a print queue item's Properties dialog box.
You can close the print queue as you would any other window — by clicking the Close button in the upper-right corner or by choosing Printer 
Close from the menu bar.
Solving Common Printer Problems
If you experience a problem printing a document, the problem may be something to do with the printer. Before you assume the worst and delve into any major troubleshooting, check for some of the more common problems that cause such errors:
- Is the printer turned on and set online?
- Are both ends of the printer cable plugged in securely?
- Is there paper in the printer, and is it inserted properly?
- Is there a paper jam in the printer?
- Does the printer still have ink or toner?
More often than not, the printer problem is something as simple as the printer being out of paper or ink.
If you don't find any issues with the printer itself, do some troubleshooting in Windows. Open the Devices and Printers folder, right-click the printer, and choose Troubleshoot, as shown in Figure 26.4. Windows 10 runs through several troubleshooting steps to attempt to identify and fix the problem.
Figure 26.4 Troubleshoot a printer from Devices and Printers.
In some situations, Windows 10 identifies the problem and fixes it for you. In others, Windows 10 suggests a fix.
Printing Offline
Printing offline is a means of creating a spool file for the printer without printing the document. Sometimes this technique is useful, such as when you're working on a notebook computer with no printer attached but you intend to print later.
To make this method work, open the printer's queue and choose Use Printer Offline from the Printer menu, as shown in Figure 26.5. The printer's icon dims and shows the word offline. You can disconnect the printer from the computer.
Figure 26.5 Use Printer Offline.
You can print any document while the printer is offline. The document doesn't actually print because the printer isn't connected. When you get back to the printer, connect the printer to the computer again. Open the Printers folder, right-click the printer's icon, and choose Use Printer Online. Any documents you “printed” while disconnected from the printer start printing.
Creating XPS Documents
As an alternative to printing on paper, you can print to an XPS document. The XPS document looks exactly like the printed document will look, but it is a file rather than a sheet of paper. You can e-mail that XPS document to other people. Or, if you have a website, let people download it from your site.
To print to an XPS document, start printing as you normally would. For example, choose File Print from the program's menu bar. Or if you're in Internet Explorer or any other web browser, click Print from the menu. When the Print dialog box opens, choose Microsoft XPS Document Writer instead of your usual printer, as shown in Figure 26.6. Then click OK or Print.
Figure 26.6 Print to an XPS document.
Because you're printing to a file, a Save As dialog box opens. There you can choose the folder in which you want to place the file and give the file a name. Figure 26.7 shows a file named crimemap.xps located in the Documents folder about to be printed. Click Save.
Figure 26.7 Printing crimemap.xps in the Documents folder.
The Save As dialog box closes. To verify that the document was printed to a file, open the folder you printed to. The file is closed so it looks like an icon (see Figure 26.8), but you can treat it as any other document. For example, double-click the icon to open it into the Windows 10 Windows Reader app. Or, if you want to e-mail it to someone using an installed e-mail program, such as Microsoft Outlook, right-click the icon and choose Send To Mail Recipient.
Figure 26.8 The icon for an XPS document.
Wrapping Up
The typical printing scenario is that you choose File Print from a program's menu bar, or press Ctrl+P, to print the document you're viewing at the moment. But as you've seen in this chapter, more is going on behind the scenes, and you have ways to manage your print jobs.
This chapter covered the following points:
- Every document you print is a print job, temporarily stored in a print queue.
- To open the print queue, double-click the printer icon in the notification area, or the printer's icon in the Printers folder.
- To manage print jobs in the queue, right-click any job and choose an option from the shortcut menu.
- To cancel all documents that are waiting to be printed, choose Printer Cancel All Documents from the print queue's menu bar.
- To print to an XPS document rather than paper, start printing and get to the Print dialog box as you normally would, but choose Microsoft XPS Document Writer as the printer.
- To read an XPS document, open it in the Windows Reader app.