4. Choosing your printer
One more step and paper starts coming out. Autoprint needs to know which printer your packing slips should go to. You choose that yourself, on your dashboard.
Not sure yet whether your printer is suitable for Autoprint? That is covered in 8. Will Autoprint work with my printer?.
The printer list
As soon as the Autoprint program is running on your computer, it looks at which printers are available on it and passes that list to your dashboard. So you don't type anything: you simply pick your printer from a dropdown list.
Choose the printer you want your packing slips on, and save. That's all.
Watch for the warning sign ⚠
Some printers appear in the list with a small warning sign ⚠ in front of them. That means: this is a printer that only exists while you are logged in to the computer — a so-called user-bound printer.
This matters, because Autoprint also does its work when nobody is logged in. A printer marked ⚠ may not be findable at those moments. Our advice:
- Where possible, choose a printer without ⚠. The most reliable is a printer installed as a local printer on a TCP/IP port (using the printer's IP address). Such a printer belongs to the whole computer and keeps working even when no one is logged in.
- Only have a printer with ⚠ — one tied to your Windows user, or a shared network printer? Then it works fine as long as you're logged in yourself. For a computer that has to keep running unattended, it's better to re-add that printer as a local printer on a TCP/IP port.
In doubt? support@autoprint.shop is happy to think along.
Run a test print
Chosen one? Then run the test print right away. There's a button for it on your dashboard. Autoprint sends a real test page to the printer you selected, and you see on screen whether it worked.
This is the only real proof that everything's right: not just that the printer is in the list, but that paper actually comes out. See success appear and the test page in the tray? Then you're done — from now on your orders print by themselves.
Within seconds you see what happened:
- Succeeded — the page went to the printer. Is it actually in the tray? Then you're done.
- Failed — it says where it went wrong: fetching the test page, processing it on your computer, or the printer itself. Your computer's own message is shown underneath.
- No answer — your computer didn't respond. Is it switched on and is Autoprint running? After that you can simply try again.
So the button never gets stuck: if it doesn't work, you can try again right away.
If the test print fails, check 6. Troubleshooting.
Congratulations — Autoprint is up. From here on all you need to do is refill the paper.