Learn how to manage printers in the program. You can add them to the list, edit their information, and delete them. The topic of managing printers is related to print queues, so the following tutorial covers both topics.
Locate the printers and printouts tab
Open JustLabel and locate the Printers and Printouts tab in the left-side menu. If you use the program for the first time, the lists will be empty on each page
The Printers tab contains a list of printers managed by JustLabel. The application allows you to easily manage printers and check the current status of each of them. In addition to the information entered by the user, such as the unique name, IP address, port and description, the program itself checks and displays in the main table, if possible, the model and serial number of the device. The date the printer was added is also stored. In addition to this basic information, the Printer maintenance data section describes more detailed data retrieved from the printer software.
Review the Printers table
View the information available in the table. If you haven’t added any printers yet, continue to the next section, then review the available information
To add a printer, click the Add printer button at the top of the screen. You must enter basic information such as
and TCP connection information
Add a printer
Add new printer to the list. Notice how the printer connection and maintenance status are updated in time. You can also trigger the maintenance check as described in the Printer maintenance data section
To edit the printer information, simply find it on the list (you can use the filter at the top of the page), then click the corresponding Edit button in Actions section in the table.
Update the printer information
Edit the printer information. Click the Edit button and try to add some description
To remove a printer, you must first pause and remove the printer queues that use it. See the Pause/Resume the printer queue and Remove the printer queue sections of this tutorial for more information.
When there are no printer queues using the printer, you can simply select the checkbox at the beginning of the corresponding printer row, then use the Remove selected printers button at the top.
Try to remove the printer
Try removing the printer. Please notice how the corresponding checkbox is inactive. First remove the printer queue as described in Remove the printer queue section. Then check if the checkbox on a Printers tab is enabled
The program periodically checks the connection status with added printers and downloads diagnostic data. The status of the connection and basic information, such as the model and serial number of the device, are visible in the main table in the list of printers. However, you can expand an additional tab for each device where more detailed information is displayed. To do that, click the down arrow button in the Maintenance Details column. You can obtain there, among others, data such as:
You can manually trigger the maintenance check at any time, clicking the Trigger maintenance check button at the top. First maintenance check will update the connection status, the second will get the maintenance details data.
Check the printer maintenance data for your printer
Make sure you have added the printer, then expand the Maintenance Details at the end of the corresponding row
Please notice, that in some cases there are no maintenance details. The main reasons are no connection to printer or non standard maintenance dataframe obtained from the printer, which could not be parsed. If this happens, don’t worry, it doesn’t affect the printing process in any way. You can use the printer and print labels normally.
You can see the list of the printer queues in the Printouts tab. All the print requests are managed by the printer queues. Always, when you add a new printer, the printer queue is being created in the background and stored in the database. The name of this printer queue is, by default, the printer name with pq_ prefix. So if you add the printer named XYZ, the corresponding pq_XYZ printer queue will be created.
Please notice, that updating the printer name in Printers tab, doesn’t update the printer queue name!
You can also create additional printer queues for the same printer. This can be useful, for example, when several people will use the same printer, but using separate print queues. This allows you to enable and disable printing for each user (each queue) separately (discussed on the Pause/Resume the printer queue section of this tutorial).
The user mentioned earlier may actually be a user or users who use e.g. printouts via Excel files (covered in this tutorial), or a given ERP or other system that uses printouts via REST API (covered in this tutorial). In each of these cases, the printing is done by specifying the printer queue name, never directly the printer name.
WARNING!
You can rename the printer name without any consequences for users and integrated systems, however when renaming the printer queue, its name should be updated on all of those clients. Please keep this in mind when renaming the print queue.
Review the Printouts table
View the information available in the table. If you haven’t added any printers yet, read the previous section on adding the printer, add it, then review the available information
In each printer queue row, you can expand the Printouts tab clicking the down arrow button in the last column.
Here you can view your printing history and repeat any print by clicking the retry button in the Actions column. The information available for each of the printouts made in a given print queue are:
You can also download the CSV file with the printouts list, using the Export to CSV button in the main printer queue row’s Actions column.
Review the printouts data
Expand the printouts tab for one of existing printer queues. Try clicking the button in the Data sent to printer to see the raw code. Try to repeat the print using the retry button in the last column. Then export the CSV using the printer queue’s Export to CSV button
To add a printer queue, click the Add printer queue button at the top of the screen in the Printouts tab. You must enter basic information such as
n the list of print queues, in the Actions column, there is an icon that allows you to pause or resume the operation of the print queue. You can use it to stop or resume sending subsequent print requests from clients to the printer.
It is also necessary to stop the print queue before deleting it (and thus deleting the printer that uses the queue).
To remove a printer queue, you must first pause it as mentioned in the previous section.
When the queue is paused, you can simply select the checkbox at the beginning of the corresponding printer queue row, then use the Remove selected printer queues button at the top.
Print authorization is linked directly to queues, so you can have more control over the groups of users and/or systems that have access to your printers. It is possible to generate separate keys for each queue or multiple keys for a single queue.
More information can be found in the Print authorization tutorial, which describes how to secure access to print queues.
