User`s guide

Preface

About This Book

This book contains information for understanding the print process as well as providing

printer configurations.

Note: You can also view the information in this book with a Version 3.2 HTML–compatible

web browser.

Who Should Use This Book

This book is for system administrators and programmers to help you resolve print–related

problems. Before you read this book, you should know basic operating system commands.

This book assumes you are familiar with the information and concepts presented in the

following publications:

• AIX 4.3 System User’s Guide: Operating System and Devices, 86 A2 97HX

• AIX 4.3 System User’s Guide: Communications and Networks, 86 A2 98HX

• AIX 4.3 Installation Guide, 86 A2 43GX

How to Use This Book

The following overview briefly describes the contents of each chapter of the AIX Guide to

Printers and Printing:

• Chapter 1, ”Printers, Print Jobs, and Queues Overview for Users,” provides overviews

and some procedures related to printing files.

• Chapter 2, ”Printers, Print Jobs, and Queues for System Administrators,” includes

information about administrative tasks related to configuring printers and spooler queues.

• Chapter 3, ”Spooling Overview,” contains a description of the spooler components and

the interactions between those components.

• Chapter 4, ”Printer, Plotter, and Spooler Subsystem Programming,” contains an overview

of spooler internals as well as detailed information needed to address the spooler

programmatically or to modify the behavior of the spooler.

• Chapter 5, ”Spooler Troubleshooting,” contains some hints, tips, and procedures for

troubleshooting spooler problems.

Highlighting

The following highlighting conventions are used in this book:

Bold Identifies commands, subroutines, keywords, files, structures,

directories, and other items whose names are predefined by the

system. Also identifies graphical objects such as buttons, labels, and

icons that the user selects.

Italics Identifies parameters whose actual names or values are to be supplied

by the user.

Monospace Identifies examples of specific data values, examples of text similar to

what you might see displayed, examples of portions of program code

similar to what you might write as a programmer, messages from the

system, or information you should actually type.