Troubleshooting network-related printer problems

The following information may be helpful in resolving printer problems. For a comprehensive discussion of printing troubleshooting, see ``Troubleshooting printing problems''.

• If a network printer sometimes goes off-line for no apparent reason and works fine when it is reinitialized, you may have a static problem. Large amounts of static can be generated by certain special papers, such as carbonless forms. Make sure your printer is properly grounded.

• Plotters need to function much as printers in order to accept a job to plot, but plotters can have no direct interaction between themselves and the application.

  For example, the AutoCAD application talks directly to a COM port, then waits for a reply from that port. Since NetWare^® software only redirects printing to LPT ports, AutoCAD ends up waiting for COM port activity when there would not be any.

  You can handle this problem by saving a print job to a file and then using NPRINT or PCONSOLE to print the job. An alternative would be to plot to a file named LPT1 after capturing the device LPT1 with the CAPTURE command.