Information Flow from Print Document to
Printout
The figure below shows how a document is formatted for printing.
While other spool systems have only print requests that go directly to the printer, the SAP spool system differentiates between spool requests and output requests. The print process in the SAP spool system therefore consists of two steps:
...
1. When you have released a document for printing; that is, you have chosen a print option, a spool request is first created. The system differentiates between following print data during the creation of the spool request and stores the data in different places:
¡ Spool request data
This is the administrative information for the request, such as created on, created by, and the output device. This data is stored in the SAP spool database.
¡ Spool Data
This is the data that is to be printed; that is, the content of the document to be printed. This data is stored in a special data store for temporary sequential data (TemSe).
2. Only once the document is sent to the output device is the administrative data and the data to be printed combined, and an output request is generated.
To do this, the system converts the device-independent print data in the spool request into the appropriate printer language understood by the output device (for example, POSTSCRIPT, PCL-5).
By differentiating between spool requests and output requests, print data can be temporarily stored, without an output being required. This gives you the following options:
· Print immediately (Spool and output requests are both created immediately)
· Create a spool request first, and only print this later
The figure below shows a summary of how you can output data:
·
Situation
a: Spool and output requests
are created simultaneously (immediate printing). To do this, you must activate
the
Print
Immediately option in the print properties.
· Situation b: An output request is created for a spool request. This output request is then to be printed on a device. Later, a user creates two additional output requests for the same spool request. These two output requests are printed on different devices.
· Situation c: Only a spool request is created, and no output request. This means you can print a spool request at a later time without having to recreate the print data.
You an administer spool requests and output requests using the Output Controller (Transaction SP01).
