With ThinLinc, it is possible to print to a printer attached to the client computer. The print job is converted to the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) on the terminal server, and then sent through an encrypted tunnel to the client. On Windows clients, the PDF will be rendered and printed through a PDF viewer, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. On UNIX/Linux clients, the PDF job is converted to Postscript by the ThinLinc client and then sent to the default print queue.

The thinlocal printer is cluster-aware. If a user submits a print job on a node in a ThinLinc cluster which does not host the users session, the print job will automatically be respooled to the correct node. This is used in the recommended setup (see Section 5.2, “ Printer Configuration Overview ”.

If a user has more than one session, print jobs submitted to the local printer will be redirected to the client that made the last connection.

The local printer features is implemented as a backend to CUPS (Common Unix Printing System).

Use tl-setup to install the backend and queue in CUPS on all machines running VSM Agent. This adds a new queue named thinlocal to CUPS and makes it available to your users. It also configures this queue to use a generic postscript driver as described below.

After installation, the local printer is ready for use. Make sure your ThinLinc client is configured to allow redirection of printers, then print to the thinlocal queue, and the job will be rerouted to the default printer of the client you're currently using.

When printing via the thinlocal printer, the server has no way to know what capabilities (duplex ability, trays, paper size, etc.) the printer connected to the client has. At the same time, applications that want to print needs to know about these capabilities to print correctly.

As a compromise, the thinlocal printer is configured with a PPD (Postscript Printer Definition) that covers a broad range of printer capabilities - it's a Generic Postscript Printer driver. This makes it possible for CUPS to convert input formats to the correct format before sending them to the local printer. It also means that default values can be set for some of the configuration parameters, for example paper size, using the CUPS configuration interface.

If your ThinLinc cluster contains one or more Windows Terminal Servers, the thinlocal printer needs to be added as a queue to each of them. See Section 5.2.4, “ Printer Configuration on Windows Terminal Servers ” for details.