[THIN] Re: thinprint for 64bit Citrix to 32bit PrintServer

Hi Anthony,

 

Citrix UPD is okay until you throw in session printers and at that point you're dealing with the whole printer driver mess. So you've got a "simple" choice, redesign your whole printing environment to use autocreated printers and the Citrix UPD only or get a third-party printing solution.

 

I was in a printing workshop with Joe Shonk and Tim Mangan at Briforum and it was really painful to have to tell all the Citrix customers with printing problems that ultimately the only way to really fix their printing problems was to buy something else. Joe had a definite preference for Tricerat Screwdrivers but when it comes to fast and efficient WAN UPD printing, particularly of large pdf documents with embedded graphics, you're down to ThinPrint and Quest/Provision Networks Print-IT. I've implemented ThinPrint in a former life and have a definite preference for Print-IT but I also work for Quest/Provision.

 

One of the pretty important components of efficient printing with a UPD solution is how it handles fonts not found on the rendering machine (client, remote print queue etc). A delightfully ugly way to test this is to insert a few characters from the SimSun font into a standard word document and see what it does to the size of the print payload. When your print job payload balloons by 20-40 MB for a 2-3 page document it's time to look for a better printing solution.

 

regards,

 

Rick

--
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 2:22 AM, Anthony Green <agreen@f2s.com> wrote:

After a lot of rooting around we found the same.  Print Drivers do exist for a quite a lot of the printers (mostly OKI and HP) it's just a pain trying to find them.

 

I've been looking at this for  a couple of days and there seems to be a few ways to go "printdriver-less".

 

Has anyone ever gone down the route of driverfree printing and had it work in medium/large citrix environments with mixed network printers?

 

I'd be particularly interested in printeron, print-it, thinprint, ghostscript?  Any others?

 

Thanks,

Ant.