Printing in a VMware View environment does almost look like printing on a physical desktop for the user. For example the user works with some office application and wants to print the document on his local connected Canon iP5300 printer. This is an ink jet printer and it does have some special features integrated with the original Canon printer driver. The user does press the print button and wants to set some properties for printing the document.

On a View desktop  he’ll get the ThinPrint printer driver properties dialog instead of the Canon’s one because VMware View is using this drivers as part of the Virtual Printing component which helps to print compressed, encrypted and with no need to install all printer drivers of your local printers on the virtual desktops.

The ThinPrint offers all important printer driver features, including Portrait/Landscape printing, color and grey scale, resolution, paper size, copy count and more. This will fit for the user in 9 of 10 cases but there is this one case, where the users needs a special feature of the Canon printer driver. In this case it is possible to print directly to the original Canon printer driver which is installed on the client device. For doing that the user needs to switch to the Advanced tab in the ThinPrint driver properties dialog and enable the checkbox (Preview on client before printing).

This will force the ThinPrint driver to send the print data stream to the local client and preview the print job before printing.

From there the users just needs to click the print button and the standard Canon printer driver does open as usual.

This will help to use all functions offered by the local installed printer drivers delivered by the printers vendor. But as I said before in 9 of 10 cases you’ll not need it.

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