Technical Articles
Print Smart form to a desired local printers connected to your PC
Introduction:
I am going to explain, how to access locally connected printer devices and print our smart form to selected printer directly with default device settings in transaction SPAD from the Report. Please follow the below process
Step 1: Make sure that your user maintenance settings for default device as shown below in SU01. Need to add local printer to your system. We can maintain any local device in transaction SPAD to access the frontend printers.
Step 3: We need to pass the required data to the parameters to the smart form Control Parameters and Output options as shown in below.
Step 4: Execute the report, we can see the available front end printers which are available. Select any one of them to get print our smart form.
Conclusion:
When you print smart form through LOCAL, the system sends the request to the printer using the Printer Driver installed on your PC. Printer name goes through the printer driver defined on the application server and linked to the printer in transaction SPAD. Based on SAP versions, these can be called with different print control characters. This device configured in SPAD communicates with the printer driver in order to print through the selected frontend printer.
Thank You
Hope the above blog was helpful 🙂
Thanks for sharing, Maheswari! I am a bit confused though on what this blog is trying to explain exactly… I already know a lot about what you're explaining but still I'm having trouble following the train of thought.
It starts with setting the default printer for the user. (This can be also done easily in SU3 transaction, by the way, not always we have access to SU01.) It should be noted that this would apply to all the output, no matter whether Smartforms or SAP Script or PDF was used. Unless different device was set in the output, it will be sent to the user’s default printer. And this doesn’t necessarily need to be a local one, can be any other printer as well.
It’d make sense to also explain how LOCL printer works, it’d be helpful if you included its configuration from SPAD. Basically, it passes output to the printer configured in Windows (I’ve only used this on PC, not sure how/if it works with Macs), usually the default one.
I honestly don’t understand what Step 2 is doing here, sorry. If the goal is to offer the users a prompt for a specific local printer then there is a setting in SPAD that can be used (“with user control” or something like that).
Step 3 explains filling in the Smartform parameters in the print program. However, (a) the printer parameter is shown as commented out, so that’s not going to do anything and it’s just as well because (b) I wouldn’t actually recommend hardcoding the printer name like that. Also it’s not clear why this is needed either. If we set the default in step 1 then why do we need to specify printer here? What happens if we don't? Not to mention, this seems to pertain specifically to the scenarios when a Smartform is called by a custom print program. Because if we're talking about standard output functionality (where Smartforms are also used) then it's the whole different story.
Step 4 says to execute the report but what report? Seems to be something missing here.
Most of this information is also not specific to Smartforms. So, nice effort but going forward, I’d recommend to make the explanation more clear and accurate.
Thank you.
Useful blog Maheswari...Thanks for sharing