Supported files
What Printy prints
Section titled “What Printy prints”| Type | Extensions |
|---|---|
.pdf | |
| JPG | .jpg, .jpeg |
| PNG | .png |
| TIFF | .tif, .tiff |
Each folder chooses which of these count. A type that is not selected is ignored entirely — not printed, not moved, not recorded. A folder set to PDF only can sit on a directory full of images and never touch them.
Matching is on the extension, case-insensitively. A file with no extension is never printed.
What Printy does not print
Section titled “What Printy does not print”Office documents — DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and the rest. Printing them correctly means an Office installation and driving it reliably in the background, which is a different program from this one. Export to PDF first; most systems that generate these files can generate PDF directly.
Raw printer formats — ZPL, EPL and similar label languages are not passed through. Printy renders pages; it does not spool raw command streams.
Archives — a ZIP is not unpacked.
Anything else — including text files, HTML and SVG.
Files that are skipped
Section titled “Files that are skipped”Beyond file type, a file is passed over when:
- It is still being written. Printy waits until size and modification time stop changing. A scan mid-transfer is picked up on a later check, not printed in half.
- It has been seen before. Printy recognises a file it has already handled, by content rather than name alone, so a file that reappears under a new name is not printed twice.
- It is in a subfolder. Only the watched folder itself is scanned. This is what keeps
printedandfailedfrom being reprinted.
When a file of a supported type still fails
Section titled “When a file of a supported type still fails”A PDF can be a valid file and still be unprintable — encrypted, truncated, or built in a way the renderer cannot handle.
Printy tries three times and then marks the job failed, with the reason shown in Verlauf. With the default post-print rule the file moves to failed; it is never deleted, even in folders set to delete after printing.
On Windows, a PDF that fails to render can often be printed by configuring SumatraPDF as a fallback — see Platform differences.
There is no fixed limit. Very large documents take longer to render and use more memory while they do; a multi-hundred-page PDF prints, it just does not print instantly.
Images with extreme pixel dimensions are scaled down to something a printer can use before being sent, rather than rendered at their full size.