The print queue

Between “a file appeared” and “paper came out” sits a queue. Understanding it explains most of what Printy does when something goes wrong.

From file to job

1. A folder’s check finds a file of a selected type that Printy has not seen.
2. The file is observed until it stops changing. Only then is it queued.
3. The job snapshots the folder’s settings — printer, copies, duplex, colour mode and the fit-to-page flag. From that moment the job carries its own copy.
4. The job is printed, and the post-print rule is applied to the file.

Step 3 is what makes the history trustworthy. A finished job records what it was actually printed with, not what the folder happens to be set to today.

Job states

State	Meaning
Wartet	Queued, not started.
Druckt	Handed to the print spooler.
Wiederholt	An attempt failed; another is scheduled.
Gedruckt	Accepted by the printer.
Fehlgeschlagen	Gave up.

Note

Gedruckt means the printer accepted the job. Whether paper came out is outside what Printy can observe — a printer that takes a job and then jams reports success.

When something fails

Printy distinguishes two kinds of failure, and the difference matters a lot.

A problem with the file

A PDF that cannot be read, an image that is not really an image. Printy retries three times, waiting 5 seconds, then 30, then 120. If all three fail, the job is marked Fehlgeschlagen and — with the default post-print rule — the file is moved to failed.

The queue then carries on with the next job. One broken document never blocks the rest.

A problem with the printer

The printer is off, unplugged, out of paper, or otherwise unreachable. This is not treated as a failure of the job.

The queue holds. Nothing is marked failed, nothing is moved to failed, and no retry is consumed. The affected folders show Wartet auf Drucker and the tray icon shows the hold. When the printer is reachable again, printing resumes within about a minute and works through the backlog.

That distinction is deliberate: someone switching a printer off at the end of the day should not come back to fifty failed jobs and fifty files in a failed folder.

If Printy is killed mid-print

A job that was in Druckt when the application stopped is marked Fehlgeschlagen with the reason interrupted on the next start. It is never reprinted on its own.

This is the conservative choice, and intentionally so. Printy cannot know whether the spooler had already produced the page. Reprinting automatically would silently duplicate documents; leaving it failed puts one visible entry in the history that you can reprint with one click if the paper never appeared.

Printing something again

Any finished or failed job can be reprinted from Verlauf — see History and reprinting.

Pausing

Alles pausieren stops all watching. Jobs already in the queue finish; nothing new is added. Files arriving while paused are not lost — they are found when you resume, because they were never recorded as seen.

Pausing a single folder does the same for that folder only.