Print a print job

After a port has been opened, as described in Opening and closing a port, the spooler can send print jobs to the port.

Each print job is delimited by spooler calls to a language or port monitor's StartDocPort and EndDocPort functions. The spooler calls these functions when a print processor calls the spooler's StartDocPrinter and EndDocPrinter functions.

Within the scope of a set of StartDocPort and EndDocPort functions, unlimited spooler calls to a monitor's WritePort, ReadPort, and GetPrinterDataFromPort functions can occur.

Each of these functions requires the port handle returned by OpenPortEx (or OpenPort) to be specified as in input argument. Typically, a language monitor implements each of the functions by calling the like-named function in its associated port monitor.

When the spooler calls a language monitor's WritePort function to send a data stream to the port, the function generally adds language-specific information, such as PJL commands, to the received data stream before passing it to the associated port monitor's WritePort function.

The ReadPort function is used for obtaining status information from bidirectional printer hardware, which a language monitor might send to the spooler by calling SetPort. The spooler does not call the ReadPort function.

If printing hardware is bidirectional, both its language monitor and its port monitor should support a GetPrinterDataFromPort function. A language monitor's GetPrinterDataFromPort function should accept a registry value name as input, obtain a value for that name (generally by calling associated port monitor's WritePort and ReadPort functions), and return the value to the caller. A port monitor's GetPrinterDataFromPort function should accept an I/O control code as input, call DeviceIoControl to pass the control code to the port driver, and return the result.