Cancel a Bunch of PDF Prints

Hello,

Sometimes a employee will accidently print 80+ Pages out of Revit w/ the PDF function called PDF995. Most folks at our company print each page vs a combine or at least the ones that have reached out when they print WAY too many sheets seem to always print a bunch of singles vs a combine. We also have BlueBeam as another function to PDF with but recommend folks use PDF995 as it does not pull a license. Id also like to say when printing out of Revit its usually 30"x40". I know if I kill Revit it will stop the prints but most cases they have not saved/Synced their work and this is not ideal anyway. Stopping the Spooler locally on their PC seems to shave some time off as Revit throws the error of not being able to print the PDF.

I would have thought the PDF function of printer would have been tied to another service than the spooler. I also was not seeing PDF995 or anything referencing PDFs in running tasks. Right clicking on the printer on the task bar and canceling the document or all documents does not help as each PDF since most of the time is several pages vs a combine. I wonder if there is a way around this like turning off the spooler to grab all the sheets at once so they can cancel them vs having the spooler on and spool each page and then print that page. Would it really be that much slower these days without the spooler?

Any other suggestions? Look forward to hearing from you.

Hi,

You cannot stop the Spooler without loosing all printers.

Some Driver will offer the option to print directly to the Printer. But most of the time performance becomes very poor. If not worse.

When something like this occurs I stop the Print spooler, delete the contents of C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS and restart the spooler, this clears completely the print queue.

If you have this "accident" occurring often you can create a cmd file that does the process and put a shortcut to it accessible so the users can stop the process themselves.

Code:

net stop spooler
del /Q /F /S “%systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers\*.*"
net start spooler

Hello MaloK

I'm a little iffy about deleting stuff from System32 folders. Have you had issues printing to a printer or PDF functions after doing so? I had sent 9 separate PDF prints out of Revit and it was sending them two at a time. I noticed when I go to that printer folder in system32 it will have a .SHD file and a .SPL for one PDF page and add another on top of that but it shows no more than two PDFs being sent to the spooler at a time.




I think it would show all the PDFs at once in the spooler before it starts printing making the PDFs. Since I have not ran the cmd yet stopping the spooler in local services then clearing that printer folder and re-starting the spooler stops all the subsequent PDF prints?

Also, in that .bat file says net start spooler. Is there a cmd for re-start vs start?

Start by cancelling the jobs in the spooler, before running the batch file. Creator/owner have delete permission on the directory content. Some software will restart to spool as soon as the spooler restarts. In these case I pause the printer from it's panel and let the application spool completely all jobs before running the batch file.

net stop / net start does a restart of the service.

You may also find in your print driver an option to spool completely the whole job before starting to print.

MaloK,

Thanks, I'll try it out and look to see if the driver has that setting to spool all first before printing.