iPrint now supports printing from mobile devices that have limited abilities to convert documents into print-ready formats. On desktop platforms, the documents are usually converted to print-ready formats by the application, driver, and the spooler subsystems. This functionality is primitive or non-existent in many of the mobile devices and hence must be provided by the Print Service. To facilitate this, iPrint now provides Rendering and Conversion capabilities in the product and can convert and render most of the documents that are submitted by a mobile device, email, or other submission methods.
This conversion (rendering) is performed on the iPrint Appliance using our built-in solution known as Local Renderer. Printing quality varies, depending on the document complexity so for enhanced desktop-quality printing, you can use the Remote Renderer on a Windows platform.
You can view the Local renderer and list of remote renderers in the Management Console > iPrint Appliance Configuration, Renderers page.
The renderers support broad range of document formats. For more information, see Section C.8, Supported Document Formats By the Local Renderer and Remote Renderer.
iPrint Appliance is bundled with a built-in document renderer known as Local Renderer. The renderer converts documents to the PDF format, and then converts them to the print-ready format using CUPS. The renderer supports multiple formats, has a multithreading feature, and provides limited support for Microsoft Office formats. If a printer does not have a driver associated with it, the default printer driver PostScript is automatically used to print documents.
iPrint Appliance also ships with a Remote Renderer. For enhanced desktop-quality printing, you can use the Remote Renderer. The remote renderer can be downloaded from the iPrint Appliance Management Console and installed on a Windows 64-bit computer.
The remote renderer provides high quality rendering for different formats. The remote renderer job might take some additional time to complete the print jobs in comparison to the local renderer. If you do not want to use the built-in PDF renderer, you can also install Adobe Acrobat Pro for PDF rendering. However, if you are printing PDF using a built-in pdf renderer, then there can be some minor print quality differences such as color shade difference in the PDFs.
The remote renderer communicates with iPrint Appliance for document conversion. Although, it is not a mandatory requirement for iPrint Appliance, the remote renderer is recommended for desktop quality printing.