Universal Printer

The TSplus Universal Printer allows you to print documents from any PC or mobile device. See the video tutorial to print with the Universal Printer.

Starting Remote Access version 17, Universal Printer leverages novaPDF (https://www.novapdf.com/) to produce 100% industry-standard PDF (Portable Document Format) files from the remote document. The generated PDF document is then sent to the desired local printer.

The Universal Printer (novaPDF) replaces the previous Universal Printer which are discontinued and no longer available to install on your Remote Access server.

NovaPDF11Service service should be in the exlcusion list of any active firewall or antivirus.

Configure the Universal Printer

To configure your Universal Printer, open the AdminTool and click on the Printers menu.

Screenshot 1-1

Note: Two printers are available for remote printing: Universal Printer and Virtual Printer. Although Virtual Printer offers better printing performance, it is not compatible with the HTML5 client. See TSplus Virtual Printer. Therefore, the Universal Printer is set as the default printer following Remote Access setup.

The Universal Printer section displays fours tiles which enables administrators to:

  • Check the Universal Printer setup status. If the Universal Printer is not installed, then clicking on the tile will install the Universal Printer.

  • Check the Universal Printer printing status. If the Universal Printer is not ready to receive print jobs, the tile may display additionnal relevant information about the error.

  • Check if the Universal Printer is set as the default printer. If the Universal Printer is not set as the default printer, then clicking on the tile will set it as the default printer. Please note that this behavior may be overriden by your users should they be allowed to do so.

  • The tile named Universal Printer Manager leads to an more detailled screen which provides additonnal actions and properties, such as removing the Universal Printer.

Universal Printer Manager

The Universal Printer Manager allows administrator to check the Universal Printer status, remove the Universal Printer, access to the printing queue and printer properties.

In particular, the button located at the bottom of the page allow administrators to:

  • Remove the Universal Printer: Uninstall the Universal Printer. It can be reinstalled later from this screen.

  • View Printer: Opens a window where you can see the status of your printing documents, pause, resume or cancel the print job. You can also set your printing preferences and properties.

  • Universal Printer Properties: Opens this window, where you can see all the printing properties. After the General Tab, there are tabs for sharing, ports, advanced, color management, security and device settings. At the bottom of the popup window, the printer properties allows administrators to set the page size for printing from A4 to any kind of printing format. You can also choose between two printing orientations: Portrait or Landscape.

Screenshot 1-2

Note: The Universal Printer leverages novaPDF, which enables administrators to create profiles to define fonts, graphics, watermark, overlays and more through the Manage profiles button located below the Page size and Orientation sections on the printer properties popup window. Should a profile be selected by default, then the Show Select Profiles dialog before printing may be checked to allow user to select a profile before printing. Please refer to the novaPDF documentation for more details about profiles: Profile Manager.

Printing with the Universal Printer

While printing using this printer, the document in the print queue is automatically converted into a PDF file by the Universal Printer (novaPDF) printer.

Screenshot 2-1

Screenshot 2-2

The generated PDF file is then pushed to the local PDF reader of the user's workstation.

Each print job is opened as soon as it is ready on the user's local disk. The printing process starts once the PDF file has been transferred on the client' side, which guarantees the print job to start without delay.

Screenshot 2-3

Configuring Printing options with the Client Generator

You can choose from 3 printing options on the Local Resources tab of the Portable Client generator:

Screenshot 2-4

  • Local PDF Reader preview: the document is pushed on the client's workstation and the local default PDF reader opens the received PDF file. The user can then print it, or save a copy on his local disk drive (this behaviour is expected when printing from an HTML5 session).

  • Print on the user's default printer: the document is automatically printed by the user's default printer (this option is only available when using th TSplus connection client). This option is preferred for users who have a lot of print jobs to print during the day and use the same printer for this purpose.

  • Select a local printer: the user can select one of his local printer (this option is only available when using th TSplus connection client).

For reading PDF files, these days many people get by without having to use an external application at all. Both Firefox and Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser, come bundled with in-browser PDF readers, so an external plugin is no longer necessary for most users.

Troubleshooting

Activating and collecting logs is useful when troubleshooting. Please find below the executable relevant to the Universal Printer, the registry key of file which allows to enable logs and the location of the generated logs.

Logs from the server-side

  • Session opening logs
  • Universal Printer Server
  • Session events (location: %appdata%\UniversalPrinter\logs)

All activated from the AdminTool > Advanced > Logs section

Logs from the client-side

  • Connection Client
  • Universal Printer Client

These logs can be enabled by creating the following key value in the registry: HKEYLOCALMACHINE\Software\Digital River\ConnectionClient\Debug" = "true"

The resulting logs are located here: C:\Users\\RDP6\logs