TurboPrint's printer monitor gives you detailed information about your printer, e.g. the printer status (“idle“ / “printing” / “paper out”), the remaining ink levels, information about the current print job (print settings and an optional preview), a list of all remaining print jobs and even information on the ink consumption.
Queue
To every installed printer one or more print queues are assigned. The drop-down list “Queue” shows all installed printers with their print queues. Select the print queue that you want to have monitored.
Even printers with non-TurboPrint drivers and network printers are listed. However, for technical reasons, not all status information will be available for those printers.
Print queue state
Next to the “Queue” drop-down list you find two buttons that show and control the state of the selected printer queue. The first button changes the general state (“Idle" / "Printing” / “Stopped”), the second one determines if new print jobs will be accepted.
By clicking the buttons, you can change the print queue state. Depending on your Linux distribution, you might need to authorize this by entering the administrator password of the CUPS printing system.
The first queue state button controls if the print queue is activated. It can show one of the three following states:
Pressing the button in the “Printing” state changes the state to “Stopped” and cancels the current printout. The document will be printed again from start after changing the state back to active (“Idle” or “Printing”).
The second queue state button divides if new print jobs will be accepted. Two states are possible:
Note: Depending on your Linux system, you might need to authorize changing the print queue state by entering an administrator name and password of the CUPS printing system.
CUPS administrators might have to be set up first in the CUPS printing system – your Linux user password might not be accepted. Read more about CUPS administrators in the documentation of your Linux distribution or the CUPS printing system (headword “lppasswd”)
Field “Printer“
The “Printer” field shows the current status reported by the the printer. Of course these status messages are only available if the printer is connected and switched on.
Note:
the printer should be connected via USB interface. Also make sure that the printer is set up with the TP-USB backend driver – otherwise printer monitoring is disabled while printing (see “ 4.3 Setting up a printer”).
Printer status messages might not be available for printers connected via parallel interface or via network.
with certain printers status messages are not supported by TurboPrint
Preview Jobs
TurboPrint enables you to preview every page on the screen before sending it to the printer. Thus you can check if the page was rendered correctly and decide if it shall actually be printed. Especially when printing from web browsers printouts often look very different from what you expected. With the preview function you can avoid misprints and save paper and ink.
Activate the preview function with the “Print Preview” checkbox of TurboPrint Printer Monitor.
After a print job has been started, a preview of every page is presented on the screen. Select “Print Page” to have this page printed or “Skip” to omit it. Pressing “Print All” continues printing without previewing any further pages of the current job. Pressing “Abort” cancels the current print job.
Note: You can enlarge the preview window with the mouse to get a more detailed view of the page.
Tool buttons
Next to the printer status message box your find some buttons that open different tools: “monitor settings”, “printer settings” and “printer toolbox”.
Monitor-settings
This menu lets you configure some basic settings of the TurboPrint printer monitor:
Open monitor on print job
If this option if chosen, the printer monitor window is opened automatically when a print job is started by a TurboPrint driver.
Open monitor on print error
The printer monitor if opened automatically whenever any printer error occurs (e.g. If the printer runs out of paper).
Show detailed job info
You can decide how detailed settings of the current print are listed (“Info” card, field “Settings”).
If this option is deactivated, only page size, media type, quality and paper source are listed.
Printer settings
This button opens the print settings menu of the selected printer. You can find a detailed description of this menu in chapter “8. TurboPrint print settings”.
Printer toolbox
Opens the printer toolbox (test page, print head cleaning, etc.) - see chapter “7. Printer Toolbox”.