"Linda Liu [MSFT]" wrote:

> Hi M,
>
> Based on my understanding, you'd like to detect the printer's status before
> you print a document. If I'm off base, please feel free to let me know.
>
> I am not SNMP expert, so I couldn't give you any assistance on SNMP.
>
> The status of printers and print jobs are updated by the Win32 Spooler
> during the despool of a print job. All other time, when that printer is not
> despooling and resports no state information, the printer is considered to
> be ready and idle. It means that if there's no print job in the print
> queue, we have no way to get the real status of the physical printer.
>
> To determine the state of a physical printer, there is one fundamental
> premise that must be true: the Spooler must be attempting to send a print
> job to the physical printer. This is the only time the state of the printer
> is reported by the port monitor. In addition, the most meaningful
> information may be reported in the status members of a JOB_INFO structure
> for that particular print job because some port monitor will have set these
> values directly.
>
> For more information on how to get the status of a printer and a print job,
> you may visit the following KB article.
>
> 'How to get the status of a printer and a print job'
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/160129/en-us
>
> Hope this helps.
> If you have any question, please feel free to let me know.
>
> Sincerely,
> Linda Liu
> Microsoft Online Community Support
>
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