HPDPS Terminology

All jobs are printed on hardware called printers or printer devices. Within your printing system, there are likely to be many printer devices with each device having its own capabilities. For example, some printer devices can print on both sides of the page, some can print PostScript documents, and so on. HPDPS internally represents each printer device and its capabilities as a physical printer. Each physical printer within an HPDPS environment has an associated print queue and logical printer, defined below.

When you submit a job for printing, you submit it to a logical printer. HPDPS uses a logical printer to check (validate) the printer requirements of a job and determine if there is a physical printer capable of handling the job requirements before the job is accepted. When HPDPS accepts the job, the logical printer provides some default values for the job and places the job in a print queue where the job waits until an appropriate physical printer is available to print the job.

HPDPS manages and prints jobs by using objects such as printers, jobs, and queues. Each HPDPS object has attributes and associated attribute values. For example, the attributes of a job define the printer requirements of the job, and the attributes of a physical printer define the capabilities of the printer device it represents. Using particular attribute values, HPDPS can determine which printer device is capable of printing the job.

The logical printers, queues and physical printers to which you have access are all managed by a server. The HPDPS environment has two types of servers: the spooler and the supervisor. The HPDPS spooler is the server that manages the logical printers. The HPDPS supervisor is the server that controls the physical printers that print the job.

Each HPDPS command described in this book acts on one or more of HPDPS objects. These commands enable you to submit, modify and remove jobs. They also enable you to query the status and attributes of your jobs and all the other objects in your HPDPS environment.

If HPDPS uses Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) services, the environment is called a DCE Extended Environment; if DCE services are not used, then HPDPS operates in a Basic Environment. This has implications for how your print system is set up. See the HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide for more information.