There are various ways to send a print job to a remote printer. The mainframe itself may be set to send your print jobs to a printer in another room or you may use Winet to redirect a print job arriving at your PC to another PC or printer.

LPD is a very old and well-established standard to use across many different platforms. Winet offers you the “LPR” printing method that will send the print data to an LPD print server at another IP address. Some LPD printers are very specific with case sensitive queue names, which must correspond exactly at both the client (LPR) and the server (LPD). So take care when you type the LPD queue namesLPDterms. Winet will pass the data on without any changes to it – no formatting is done at your PC.

Using Winet’s “DirectPrintingTypeDirect” type of printingPrintingTypes to shared network printers may fail under certain circumstances. Microsoft reduced their support for this type of printing in their newer operating systems (post Windows 98). Normally it works between 9x machines and NT machines, but it doesn’t work between two NT machines! We have also found that some network-enabled printers connected directly to a LAN may loose data.

There are a number of ways to workaround these problems. In this section we’ll call the PC with the printer or the network printer itself, the "printserver" and the user's PC the "desktop".

1. This is only an option if the source of your print jobs is a spooler on your mainframe or Unix box: Run InetLPDHID_LPD_OVERVIEW or InetPrintServerHID_PRINTSERVER_OVERVIEW on the printserver and direct your printouts from the mainframe to the IP address of the printserver. (Now you don't need an LPD or Socket Print Server on the desktop. This is the simplest case and recommended way if you can change the IP addresses on the mainframe.)

or

2. Run InetLPD on the printserver (or some network enabled printers include their own LPD server). Change the type of printingPrintingTypes at the desktop (either in InetLPD, InetPrintServer or the terminal’s screen or host printer) to LPRPrintingTypeLPR. The setup of this LPR HIDD_LPR_PRN_SETUP printing must specify the IP address of the printserver and the lpd queue name at the printserver.

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3. Install the printer driver as a local printer on the desktop, and let Windows capture or redirect the LPT1 port to the shared Windows printer on the printserver. To achieve this you may try the Windows command: net use LPT1 or the Novell alternative which is the capture command. Windows 9x often offers a “Capture Printer Port” at printer properties.

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4. (Similar to 2 but use the Windows LPR instead of InetLPR on the desktop.) Run InetLPD on the print server. Install a local printer on the desktop and create a new "Standard TCP/IP port" with Custom Settings to make it an LPR client. Keep the type of printingPrintingTypes as DirectPrintingTypeDirect at the desktop (either in InetLPD, InetPrintServer or the terminal’s screen or host printer), but select the local printer connected to the new "Standard TCP/IP port".

More at: Printing general informationPrintingGenInf.