>Hi,
>
>I want to know if there is a way to make the printer wait while I manually feed special type paper(in our case - blue color paper). Right now, when I issue print, it directly prints onto whatever paper is there in the printer.
>
It's printer-dependent; in some cases, you can select a different bin (for example, most HP-compatible laser printers have at least a top bin and a manual feed; I'm fortunate enough to have printers with multiple bins at work, and set up windows to address each bin separately, and then assign a common name to each bin or common set of bins on the network.)
Unfortunately, most printers are colorblind, and will require the user to make the decision for them. You may be able to use the features of your spooler to cause Windows or the operating system to force a manual operator intervention when different queues are accessed (I used this tactic with NetWare successfully, where I associated a paper type with a specific print queue in NetWare, and the network print operator was notified when the printer needed to service a job with a different print type.)
The problem that can occur is that your program may finish executing before Windows has printed something; the spooler buffers output to the printer, since in general, you can write to disk faster than you can print to a printer. You could disable the spooler, in which cse your app would wait for our printed output to finish before returning control to the app, but you'd spend a lot of time waiting on the printer, especially with big print jobs and (relatively) slow printers - there's a big difference in print time to print 100 pages on a 4ppm inkjet vs a 40ppm enterprise-level laser printer; from your applications perspective, though, the spooler will let you go with relatively little regard to pritner speed, and to little things like running out of paper...
If you use network printers, it may not be possible to bypass the spooler entirely, since even if your local system isn't spooling output, the odds are that the print server or station hosting the printer is...
>Thanks.
