Creating Printers

Printers represent the printer devices in your environment that receive jobs from TotalFlow Production Manager. You can create printers to represent printer devices at up to fifteen IP addresses. Because more than one printer can represent the same printer device, you can create more than fifteen printers.

These types of printers can receive jobs in TotalFlow Production Manager:

The type of printer that you create in TotalFlow Production Manager to represent a printer device depends on the capabilities of the printer device:

Job Ticket printer
Job Ticket printers are associated with printer devices that support job tickets. You can specify job options by editing the job tickets for jobs assigned to Job Ticket printers.

TotalFlow Production Manager workflows that are associated with Job Ticket printers can receive jobs from these programs:

  • RICOH TotalFlow Production Manager Job Submission
  • RICOH TotalFlow Prep
  • RICOH TotalFlow PM PDF Print Driver
  • External online applications such as MarcomCentral Web-to-print system.
They can also receive jobs in a hot folder or from a print command that uses the line printer daemon (LPD) protocol. Job Ticket printers can communicate directly with printer devices and obtain status on the jobs while they are printing.

Passthrough printer
Passthrough printers are associated with printer devices that can print jobs in many different formats, for example, PCL, PostScript, and PDF. Jobs assigned to passthrough printers do not have job tickets. TotalFlow Production Manager workflows that are associated with Passthrough printers can receive these jobs in a hot folder or from a print command that uses the LPD protocol. Passthrough printers cannot report job status.

Passthrough printers can receive jobs from RICOH TotalFlow Production Manager Job Submission.

TotalFlow Production Manager uses assignment properties to assign jobs to both types of printers. If the values of all the assignment properties for a job match the values of the corresponding assignment properties for a printer, the job can be assigned to the printer.

Job property Printer property
Customer Customer name
Paper Settings ( Name on Paper page of Properties for Job editor) Paper Settings ( Name of the papers in the printer's input trays or scheduled in paper changes for the printer)
Staple/Bind Staple
Punch Punch
Fold type Folding
Color/Black and white Color mode
Total sheets Job total sheets supported
Requested Printer Requested Printer

Note: If you create more than one printer to represent the same printer device, you might encounter these conflicts:
  • Because each printer has its own queue in the Queues pod, you do not see a combined queue for the printer device.
  • Jobs might not print in the order that you expect.
  • A job assigned to one printer might print between the header page and the body of a job assigned to another printer.
  • If both a Job Ticket printer and a Passthrough printer represent the same printer device, you might not be able to view the status of jobs assigned to the Job Ticket printer when the Passthrough printer is processing a large job.
To avoid these conflicts, enable only one of the printers at a time.

In this section:

  1. Creating Job Ticket Printers
    Job Ticket printers are associated with printer devices that support PDF. They can print PostScript and PCL jobs if a workflow step converts these formats to PDF.
  2. Creating Passthrough Printers
    Passthrough printers are associated with printer devices that can print jobs in many different formats, for example, PCL, PostScript, and PDF.
  3. Configuring Passthrough Printers to Use the Data Replacement Tool
    This is an example of how to configure a Passthrough printer to use the Data Replacement tool for PS/PCL files.
  4. Configuring Printers to Print Separator Sheets
    TotalFlow Production Manager can print job property values on job separator sheets (banner pages) before or after a job. Job separator sheets that print before the first data pages of a job are also called header sheets. Job separator sheets that print after the last data pages of a job are also called trailer sheets.
  5. Configuring Printers for Recovery
    You can configure a printer so that, when something happens that might prevent it from printing, TotalFlow Production Manager stops assigning new jobs to that printer and starts assigning jobs that request that printer to a backup printer. Jobs that are waiting to print on the first printer are moved to the backup printer. Jobs that have already been sent to the first printer are not moved. The job that was printing when the printer stopped is moved to the backup printer.
  6. Configuring Printers to Use Papers
    This topic explains how to configure TotalFlow Production Manager printers and papers so that jobs print on the required paper. The process is the same for printers that use the Ricoh and EFI Fiery controller options.
Parent topic: Configuration