Submitting a Print Job Directly to the Spooler

The spooler provides functions that enable applications to submit print data directly to a spool queue. Normally, these functions are used by printer drivers to add a print job to a spool queue. However, this is not a recommended method unless the application is special-purpose.

The advantage of submitting print data directly to a spool queue is to bypass the GPI presentation layer. This can be useful, particularly, for sending print jobs to a network printer that is on a server that does not run the OS/2 operating system. However, there are certain requirements for direct spooling:

• Because the data bypasses the printer presentation driver, it must be in a format the printer can understand. Therefore, the application must be aware of and send the printer-specific commands.

• If the spooler is not active, the print jobs never will be printed.

The following steps are required to create a print job using the spooler directly:

• Use SplQmOpen to open the PM. (Functionally, this is similar to using DevOpenDC, which is detailed in Opening a Queued Device Context.) You must specify a queue name of PMQOPENDATA for the logical address element, pszLogAddress. PMQOPENDATA is a data structure, identical to DEVOPENSTRUC, to be used with the SplQmxxx functions.

• Use SplQmStartDoc to signal the start of your document. (This is same as using DevEscape with DEVESC_STARTDOC as used in PM printing.)

• Use SplQmWrite to write data to the spool file.

• Use SplQmEndDoc to signal the end of your document. (This is the same as DevEscape with DEVESC_ENDDOC as used in PM printing.)

• Use SplQmClose to close the PM. (Functionally, this is similar to DevCloseDC.)