What does “Spooling” mean in Printers? – When it comes to printing so many people ask this question because printing comes with so many foreign terms that you may not already be familiar with. Thus said, we will be letting you in on all that you need to know about spooling when it comes to printing.
What is Printer Spooling?
A printer spooling is a feature that helps you send large document files or a series of them to a printer, without requiring to wait until the current task is done. Printer spooling is a place where your documents can “line up” and get ready to be printed after a previous printing task is completed.
How Does Printer Spooling Happen?
From whatever computer you are printing from, the computer can handle all of the spooling. Be it as it may, if you are using a printer that is shared over your network, the network server may handle it. A “spooler program” is the feature that manages all of the print jobs in the queue. The spooler program sends the line of documents in the order they were received to the printer (when available). Even though this functionality may seem a bit frustrating at first, this functionality is actually designed to improve speed and efficiency, even though you may commonly see this term when your printer is not doing anything at all.
Benefits
Spooling in printers can come as an automated medium of managing print jobs in the proper order that they were received. It ensures that the network or printer does not become flooded and confused with requests.
Where spooling is not used, each computer would need to manually wait for the printer to become readily available before you can even hit ‘print’.
Spooling can make it easy to delete documents before they are printed since there’s a queue of documents in the order in which they were received.
With spooling you could ultimately save ink, paper, time and headache by being able to access each task individually. Also, you can reassign tasks in the spool to different printers if one is malfunctioning or simply not available.
Types
It is possible to install a print spooler directly on your computer for use at home. Most of the operating systems are designed with print spooling built in. Thus most users never have to bother about it. Most large offices use a print server. This receives all print jobs and assigns them to the printers around the building as required and handles all of the spooling, freeing up resources on the workers’ own computers.
