Member Avatar for tristanhall

Is there a program or printer driver on the interwebs somewhere that allows me to print to 2 printers simultaneously while having it show up as one printer under the Windows Printers & Faxes section?
I am in retail and we are trying to come up with a workaround that allows us to send receipts to 2 printers but our program only allows 1 receipt printer. I ran a brief Google search but the results were inconclusive (there's a lot of junk in regards to printer drivers out there).
Thanks for the assistance!

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Member Avatar for JorgeM

Sorry to ask a dumb question...but why not send 2 copies to the same printer?

commented: We need an immediate kitchen printer setup that allows our baristas to make the drink on the receipt but our current software does not allow this. +0
Member Avatar for CimmerianX

I'm only famliliar with printer pooling .... This seems like a very unique request. I know that with Certain queue management 3rd party software you can dupliate jobs on the fly....

I suppose someone could write a small app that would listen on the local port 9100 for inbound print jobs (simlualting a printer on your local port) store that job then redirect it back out to 2 other printer IPs on 9100. Doesn't seem too difficult a task.... But I've never heard of anyone actually doing that.

commented: i'll look into this in the case that printer pooling doesn't accomplish this. thank you +0
Member Avatar for BigPaw

The theory sounds feasible and straight forward, but I've never tried it. These two links explain a method called printer pooling.

Link 1

Link 2

commented: this looks like it could work. i will have to test it when i get to work. +0
Member Avatar for JorgeM

Printer pooling in Windows allows you to define a printer that is connected to two devices. It is not for printing two copies of the print job. The purpose is to provide a highly reliable print solution. The windows system will send the print job to an available printer in the event that one is still printing a job or is offline for some reason.

Member Avatar for tristanhall

Thanks everyone! I'll look into printer pooling to see if it can somehow accomplish this although JorgeM's comment points out that it probably won't do so. If all else fails I'm sure I can write a daemon that listens for print requests.

Member Avatar for CimmerianX

The pooling options won't work for you. Its just so multiple printers can service the same print queue, not for duplicating jobs.

Member Avatar for BigPaw

Ah, one of the links I posted previously was not one of those I found that would be the most helpful. As I was researching this brilliant idea of yours I had several tabs open.

Please have a look at this site there are three suggestions there, as well as an innovative use of enabling printer pooling.

Chron

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