Blogs

Introduction

RPM Remote Print Manager® ("RPM") is not my first LPD print server. That honor goes to a program called "WSLPD" which I wrote for a US government agency in the early nineties.

The LPD print protocol is not that hard to understand. There is a reference document for it available on the Internet to anyone who wants to know. You can track it down with a search for "RFC 1179". The conversation essentially goes something like this: 

Introduction

The data extraction module is part of the Elite edition of RPM Remote Print Manager® or "RPM". This module gives you a way to extract text fields from your print job using rules you define.

For instance, you might want to use an invoice number which starts at column 60 on line 5 of your print job. Let's say you want to use that in the job's file name when you archive to disk (after converting to PDF).

Hint: it had nothing to do with the database

I started up the RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM) user interface one morning, and instead of the usual list of queues and jobs, I saw this instead:

Introduction

A number of years ago we decided to host the database for RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM) in an external process. If for whatever reason we had a database problem, we didn't want to affect print job processing.

Naturally, we wanted to use some method of communication which was lightweight and reliable. We considered using the network like we did with the user interface (UI), but decided against that as the UI conversation can get very busy when there are a lot of jobs coming and processing. It seemed like a good plan to keep those two channels separated.

One of the changes we added recently in RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM) was to make your print jobs launch faster.

Whenever you receive a print job from the network, of course the aim is to process that job as soon as possible, and I believe we have been doing that all along. However, there are many other situations which result in jobs needing printing right away. We did it before, but now we do it more proactively, I believe to good result.

I have Windows 10 on my office computer, and I awoke this morning to find a new Windows version had been installed last night. I now have Windows 10 version 1607 OS build 14393.105, so that must be the one installed. Most people using our software, RPM Remote Print Manager, use it for receiving print jobs via the LPR/LPD protocol on port 515. If the Windows LPD Print Service feature is installed (and running), it conflicts with RPM's LPD functionality and prevents RPM from receiving print jobs on port 515.

A customer told us recently that if they knew we did customization on our print server product, RPM Remote Print Manager, their search for a specific PDF solution would have gone more quickly. This page gives an overview of the problems we have solved for customers since 2010.

USAIG provides aircraft insurance worldwide and maintains a huge network of underwriters and field offices. They rely on RPM to automatically email invoices, reports and worksheets generated by Redwood Software's Report2Web product. This should be of interest to anyone who prints and mails documents.