Printing Software Products

RPM Remote Print Manager(R)

Print server & virtual printer

RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM) is our print server product. RPM provides:

As a Windows print server, RPM is tuned to work well with your environment ... [read more]

Introducing the Device FAQ

RPM provides devices for you to send your print jobs to. They include printers, filter programs (as mentioned in the next topic), disk files and many others. The Device FAQ answers the questions we receive on how all that works.

Introducing the Filter FAQ

If your background is Linux, like mine, you might be curious whether "filter" means "program". It does. Otherwise, "filter" may seem like an odd name. It refers to a program you run on your data which typically transforms it into another format. In the Linux world, we used filters with the print setup to render our text files or markup formats into PostScript. Many people use filters in RPM for completely novel reasons, such as injecting data from a print job into a database.

The Filter FAQ attempts to address a complex subject with over a dozen topic pages. Enjoy!

RPM "How to"

We started a "how to" with all our articles on how to get it done using RPM. Stay tuned! New page, we'll be adding to it.

Using RPM logging to monitor and troubleshoot

From the moment you start the RPM service, it's logging events on your system including network status, Windows version, incoming print jobs, device status and much more. We put together the Logging FAQ for several reasons: even a basic introduction will help you know what is going on, and if there is a problem to troubleshoot, we show you how to do that as well.

How Text Markup works in RPM

Text Markup refers to the suite of tools we use to convert a wide variety of data into graphic output such as PDF and Windows print. I wish I had come up with a more interesting name than "text markup". Nonetheless, depending on your print workflow goals, our text markup may be a good tool for you to be familiar with.

How the LPD protocol works in RPM 6.2

RPM has nearly 25 years experience in the LPD print protocol. With the RPM 6.2 release, we have completely rewritten this important module for reliability, flexibility, and speed. This article talks about what's new, what has gone before, and how to get the most out of this key part of RPM.

How Telnet printing works in RPM 6.2

RPM has supported telnet printing for many years now. There are just one or two things which may not be obvious when you setup telnet printing in RPM. This page tells you what you need to know to be successful. Also, we talk about the upgrades we did prior to the RPM 6.2 release.

How to print ASA from a mainframe to PDF

A customer with a mainframe asks us how to convert his ASA data to both PDF and plain text. In this article, we walk through the steps to do that successfully.

RPM Release 6.2.0.487

We are making a new "smaller" release for RPM. The reason we are doing this less than 3 months after the previous release, 6.2.0.480 is that we hope we have fixed several critical problems, including:

  • the intermittent exceptions with zero length files or missing files
  • failure for the Print IP action to error the job when the receiving system fails
  • cleared up one exception that could make jobs receive and not process

There have actually been a number of improvements and fixes since the 6.2 release in July 2018. Please see the RPM Roadmap for more information.

There are several ways to get this release:

  1. Go to the Downloads page
  2. or in the User Interface, select Help / Check for Updates and follow the link

How to send print jobs to RPM

Normally it's pretty easy to send print jobs to RPM. When you install RPM it starts the service automatically and creates an exception for your firewall. However, sometimes one or more things crop up to make it a bit more challenging. This article includes nearly all our advice on sending print jobs to your RPM.

How Network Ports and Protocols Work in RPM

If you are not that familiar with ports and protocols then this page will help to guide you through that process.

Connecting Printers to RPM Print Queues Part 1: How to render text and fonts

One of the questions we hear the most is "how to connect the print queues to my printer(s)?" Here we set out to answer that question. RPM attempts to take full advantage of every feature of Windows printing, but you don't need to know all that to make a good start. This guide will walk you through the setup as if it were your first time. Maybe it is! If so, thank you.

Connecting Printers to RPM Print Queues Part 2: How to print pre-formatted jobs

Another question that comes up frequently is how to print documents which are already formatted for your printer? Examples could include PCL and PostScript as well as numerous formats which may not be as common. This guide will show you the basics, leaving room for more advanced applications.

New Folder Watcher: Announcing Queue Folders 2.0

If you have ever wanted a print server with an embedded file system watcher, then we have good news for you. Queue Folders version 2.0 is now available. It works exclusively with RPM Elite although it has a separate license.

We have listened to everything our customers have said regarding the version 1.0 release and made an all-new implementation which manages any local hard drive folder you want it to. We think you'll be pleased! We have put this product through the grinder, sending tens of thousands of files, using it with program output and Unicode filenames. You'll find the Queue Folders documentation to be pretty extensive for a beta release.

How to get Queue Folders:

  1. You can download RPM Elite
  2. Or, in the user interface go to Help / Check for Updates and select the "beta version" 6.2.0.484 or greater.

Top Tasks: Triplicate Printing

It seems like at any given time we have at least one customer exploring the question with us, “how do I print my jobs from multiple trays?” We also hear these terms: multiple-tray printing, printing on multiple printers, even printing on different colors of stock.  Read more about triplicate printing.

Top Tasks: Creating PDFs

It may be fair to say that much of the document related effort in the world today focuses on creating PDFs, at least includes PDFs as part of the output. Very commonly this is a manual process. But, when you can automate the process of creating PDFs, you are looking at a big savings of time and resources. RPM provides numerous ways to create PDFs. Read more about Creating PDFs.

Top Tasks: Watermarks

Watermarking is the process where you add one or more images to a printed page. RPM supports adding watermarks to PDF files and to text print. Watermark support is part of the RPM Elite version of the product. Read more about watermarks.

Customer Stories

We love tech here as much as the next person, more than most of the next people in fact. However, there's something inspirational about a good story. Somehow, finding out what someone else did creatively with a technology makes you think of new ways you could just possibly improve your own life as well.

We've moved our featured customer stories (check the link) and will track down the others tucked away on our site.

Database Maintenance

We admit that database maintenance is the least jazzy topic we can come up with but if you administer an RPM system, it's a good thing to know. We have a new article that should help you master this topic, and even better yet, do it in minimal time.