A friendly message to printer manufacturers

[Nic Lourens]

After all of these years there is still a common problem with printers / drivers...Please excuse my ignorance as I am not a PC techy.

How often have I got into a situation where I requested something to be printed, and halfway through the print job, decided to cancel the job.

Well, this is nigh impossible!!!

What is it about PC's, printers etc. that does not understand the 'cancel' or 'delete' function. Why have the programmers not realised by now that when the operator wants the job to be cancelled or deleted that it should just do that. That is D E L E T E the job. C A N C E L the job. And I mean ...N O W ! ! !

PLEASE write the software, somewhere to do just that. I appreciate any help.

Cheers

Nic

[godfather]

Your problem depends on the printer.

In my case the printer has a button to cancel and purge the memory, so by cancelling the print job first (using Control Panel -Printers, or the active Printer icon in the task bar) then purging the memory it works just fine.

Otherwise its like asking NZ post to return a letter you didn't mean to post, it cannot be done without shooting the postman. (Turning off the printer part way through the job, clearing the paper jam)

If your printer has the facility, no "software" is required, just cancelling the job underway from within Windows should work. If the printer has internal spool memory, then it should have the purge (reset) function assigned to a button.

It's hard to comment without knowing what printer you have though.

[andrew93]

With faster network speeds and increased printer RAM sizes, the print jobs are spending less time in the print queue, or spend less time at the PC end of the process, and they are passing through to the printer more quickly. Very often entire jobs are loaded into the printer memory before the first page has printed so trying to cancel the job from the PC is like the proverbial horse and gate. Although as previously mentioned, a lot of printers have a cancel job button or function which would be more effective.
A

[Graham L]

Another problem is that with a fast printer, the job would often be done before you realised you didn't really mean it.

I used to see people wishing for this when what they really needed was a computer which would do what they wanted; not what they told it to do. They would get charged for printing 200 or so pages of PostScript code , not the few pages of graphics the PS code was supposed to produce.

[pctek]

That is D E L E T E the job. C A N C E L the job. And I mean ...N O W ! ! !

Pulling the power plug works well......