Spool Printing vs. Direct Printing in Snapshot

Choose a printing mode that matches your needs. Use spool printing when you want to send a job to disk and continue working in the originating application immediately. Use direct printing when you want the printing device to begin output as soon as possible and you do not need to return to the application right away.

Spool printing

Spool printing writes the print job to disk and then sends it to the printer. Because the Windows print spooler handles sending the data to the printing device in the background, you can return to your application as soon as the job is written to disk.

When using spool printing, you can choose one of two behaviours:

Start printing after the last page is spooled

The printer begins printing only after the entire document has been written to disk. Choose this when keeping your application responsive is more important than immediate print speed.

Start printing immediately

The printer begins printing after the first page is spooled (this is the default). This option balances printing speed and application availability: you can return to your application quickly while the printer starts as soon as possible.

Direct printing

Direct printing sends print data directly to the printing device without spooling to disk. This can reduce the time before the printer begins output, but many applications become unavailable until the print job completes. Choose direct printing when minimizing print latency is the priority and brief application unavailability is acceptable.

Configuring printer spooling options

You configure how the Laserfiche Snapshot printer handles spooling from the Advanced tab of the Laserfiche Snapshot Properties dialog.

Note: Spool printing creates temporary spool files (for example, .shl, .shd, and .tmp) in the system spool folder. On modern Windows systems this is typically %SystemRoot%\System32\spool\PRINTERS. These files are normally deleted automatically after the print job finishes. If they remain, you can safely delete them; you may need to stop the Print Spooler service before removing locked files.

To access your printer spooling options

  1. Open Control Panel and select Devices and Printers.
  2. Right-click Laserfiche Snapshot and select Printer properties.
  3. In the Laserfiche Snapshot Properties dialog, click the Advanced tab and set the desired spooling options.