Make sure your users have installed the correct Windows printer driver for your UNIX printer. Be careful to give the correct make and model. In some cases, print jobs might fail to appear even with a similar make and model of printer.
Some users might need extra permissions in their domain to install a printer driver.
Windows printer drivers output data intended for the printer itself. Similarly, UNIX printers can use filters to convert print jobs to printable data. When printing using VisionFS, it's important that the UNIX server doesn't perform any filtering. Otherwise, the print output might not appear as expected.
If you see, for example, a PostScript® file printed as text, then your UNIX printer is filtering raw printer data unnecessarily.
By default, the VisionFS print command for shared printers tries to use ``raw'' mode, which bypasses any filters you might have for that printer. However, not all systems support filter bypassing.
Watch out for filters that identify a PostScript print job by looking for ``%!'' as the first characters in the job -- Windows often puts a <Ctrl>-D character, or other data, before the PostScript.
Some printers return information about their current status, for example, that they're out of paper. Unfortunately, this information is not returned to the UNIX server, and so doesn't appear in Windows when printing using VisionFS.
On Windows NT 3.51, you might need to connect a network drive to a shared folder on the VisionFS server before you can connect a network printer -- Windows NT reports an error, rather than ask you for a password. This affects Windows NT 3.51 users with different passwords for Windows and the VisionFS server, or all NT 3.51 users if the authentication server is a VisionFS server that's using UNIX (unencrypted) passwords.
If a UNIX printer's name contains any uppercase characters, Windows users will not be able to use the automatically generated shared printer.
You can fix this problem by doing one of the following:
If you're having problems printing using VisionFS, try printing to a file from Windows. Then, you can copy the resulting file to your UNIX server, and try different variations of the print command from a shell prompt. When you find one that works, you can set up the shared printer to use that print command.