I have a customer who needs to print certain jobs using a Windows driver. I have created an output preset that generates Generic PDFs and then uses the Windows driver to create the output. However the print file that reaches the printer is a PDF.
If I send a test print from the Windows driver this prints correctly.
The customer is using 2019.1 on Windows 2012 R2 however I can reproduce this on my VM using 2019.2 on Windows 2019. On my VM I am running the Connect Server service and the Watch service under an Administrator account. I also installed the driver while logged on using this account so there shouldn’t be any conflicts.
Any ideas why the PDF is printing will be welcome.
Some further information - Proof Print from Designer using the same Output Preset works. When using the Output Preset in the Workflow I get PDF output and not the output through the printer driver.
The PReS Connect Server service is running.
Sounds like your Create Output plugin in the workflow is set to “Through Workflow” rather than “As Defined By Preset”.
That is correct. Unfortunately, I may need to do things that way to get round another problem.
The printer is an old, unsupported dot matrix. Output from the printer driver includes a comment which the printer should treat as a comment and ignore. Unfortunately it doesn’t ignore this but prints it instead. I have used a Search and Replace after the output preset to remove the comment.
ANy other suggestions will be welcomed!
I guess I’m not following the problem at this point.
If you run a proof print from Connect Design using the Windows Driver option there, it works fine, yes?
But if you’re running the job in Workflow, you’re just getting the PDF (which I thought was the actual issue here). That’s normal, however, since you’re telling the Output preset to ignore it’s programmed output location and to just send the PDF file back to Workflow. It’s giving you this PDF because you’ve told it to create a PDF (generic PDF printer option in the output preset).
That’s all well and good. So now you have a PDF in the workflow that you are altering with the Find and Replace plugin in order to remove information that prints erroneously… and then what? What are you doing with the PDF after this? Or is that your question? How to print it after you’ve modified it in the Workflow?
Thanks Albert. You are following the problem correctly and I misunderstood exactly how the output preset works.
I had assumed that using the output preset with the Windows driver and selecting “Through Workflow” would mean that a PDF is created which is then passed through the driver and the resulting output would then be passed back to the workflow rather than directed to the port specified in the driver. That is what I needed to happen as I was then wanting to modify that output to remove the comment that the driver includes in the output.
I have to use a Windows driver as the printer doesn’t understand PS, PDF or PCL. However I also need to be able to edit the output from the driver before it hits the printer. It looks like this isn’t possible if the output destination has to be whatever the Windows driver is using and can’t be changed in the workflow.
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