CHAPTER 21Managing Print Jobs
When you print a document, more happens than you might expect. The printer doesn't immediately start printing. Instead, the computer converts your document to a set of instructions that tell the printer what to do. Then those printer instructions are sent to the printer in small chunks because the printer is a slow mechanical device compared to a computer.
Each document you print becomes a print job that waits its turn in line if other documents are already printing, or waiting to be printed. Most of this activity takes place in the background; you don't have to do anything to make it happen. In fact, you can continue using your computer normally while the document is printing.
How Printing Works
When you print a document, quite a bit of work takes place invisibly in the background before the printer even “knows” it has a document to print. First, a program called a print spooler (or spooler for short) makes a special copy of the document containing instructions for the printer. Those instructions don't look anything like the document you're printing. They're codes that tell the printer what to do so that the document it spits out looks like the document you printed.
After the spooler creates the special printer file, it can't hand the whole thing off to the printer as one giant set of ...
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