Processing or Stopping Printing

The enable and disable commands (or the Process Print Requests field on Admintool's Modify Printer window) control whether a printer prints or stops printing requests that are in the print queue. When you disable a printer, the printer stops printing requests in queue; however, requests are still added to the queue. (You must set the printer to reject print requests so requests are not added to the queue. See "Accepting or Rejecting Print Requests" for information about rejecting print requests.)

You must enable the printer whenever it has been disabled, which may happen when a printer fault occurs. When you enable a printer, it prints requests from the print queue until the queue is empty, even if the print service rejects additional requests for the print queue.

Figure 42-1 shows the point at which processing of print requests is interrupted when a printer is disabled.

Figure 42-1 What Happens When a Printer Is Enabled or Disabled