Copitrak and Kappris

Left to its own devices, if configured to monitor and cost all print jobs, Copitrak WILL prevent Kappris from working properly. Copitrak's job is to monitor print jobs and analyse them. When it does this with Kappris printing behaviour from some applications can be unpredictable and printing from Microsoft Word will hang.

To allow Kappris and Copitrak to work in harmony there are two important steps that must be taken:

1. Copitrak must be told to leave the Kappris virtual printer and the Kappris printer port alone;
2. Kappris must be told that it cannot use print job information from the print queue in order to schedule clean-up operations.

Getting Copitrak to leave Kappris virtual printer alone

Copitrack has configuration settings that will make it leave Kappris alone. These settings have been designed so that pseudo printers such as PDF creators can be excluded from Copitrak's attentions. Kappris is also a 'pseudo printer' and we can use the same technique to exclude Kappris.

The actual process that will interfere with Kappris is LaserTrak and the folder we want to work with is C:\LT2005 (or LT2009 or whatever date version you may have). This can also be called C:\Copitrak.

In this folder there are three files,  WIN32HK_2005.ini, WIN64HK.ini and LT2005_SETTINGS.ini and it is these files that we need to edit. An example of WIN32HK_2005 is given below. Here's a sample file: WIN32HK_2005.INI

[Default Printer]
OceSets=Yes
Banner Count=NO
Fax Tracking=No
Handle NUP=Yes
Count Transparencies=Yes
Delayed=Yes

[AMYUNI DOCUMENT CONVERTER 2.50]
Print Tracking=No

[Amyuni Document Converter 300]
Print Tracking=No

;[Sample Driver]
;CollateBug=Y
;ForceCollate=Yes
;OceSets=No
;Language=PCL
;Print Tracking=No

A new entry needs to be added to this so it becomes:

[Default Printer]
OceSets=Yes
Banner Count=NO
Fax Tracking=No
Handle NUP=Yes
Count Transparencies=Yes
Delayed=Yes

[Kappris XPS]
Print Tracking=No

[AMYUNI DOCUMENT CONVERTER 2.50]
Print Tracking=No

[Amyuni Document Converter 300]
Print Tracking=No

;[Sample Driver]
;CollateBug=Y
;ForceCollate=Yes
;OceSets=No
;Language=PCL
;Print Tracking=No

IMPORTANT - Details on how to edit all three files are shown here.

After the files have been saved and the LaserTrak process has been restarted, Kappris should function properly.

WARNING

WIN32HK_2005.ini is usually copied to the local machine from a central configuration folder every time a user logs in. This can mean that, as soon as you log in again, you lose the Kappris entry. Make sure therefore that the central configuration also contains the above change.

Telling Kappris not to use Print Job Information

When Kappris sends a job to print it may have to instantiate fonts to allow that job to render correctly. Conventionally, Kappris monitors the print queue to see when the job disappears from the queue in order to determine when the fonts can be destroyed and cleaned up. Copitrak, however, prevents Kappris from monitoring the print queue for this purpose and it therefore needs another means of 'cleaning up'. The effect of Kappris trying to clean up in the conventional manner is that jobs will sometimes work, sometimes hang and sometimes go missing.

To tell Kappris to clean up based on time since a font was last used (instead of by watching the print job) one must set the following entries in kappris.ini:

[Engine]
Copitrak Compatibility=True
Copitrak Font Life (mins)=240

The "font life" entry is not required if the default value of 240 minutes (4 hours) does not impact on system performance or print job rendering. If there are problems with rendering this value will need to be increased until the problem disappears. If there are performance issues, this value will need to be decreased.

Kutana Ltd is actively engaged in working on this issue with Copitrak and we hope to have a better solution in place in the near future although, to-date this solution has performed extremely well with no impact on either system performance or print job rendering.

Applies to Kappris v1.6.7.4060 and later.

Copitrak v10

Copitrak 10 was released specifically to handle printing from 64-bit apps running on 64-bit Windows. Copitrak don't insist that everyone upgrades to this version, as most people still print from 32-bit apps even if they running 64-bit Windows. For instance, Office is still 32-bit. Copitrak v10 is significant because CaxtonXPS is a 64-bit app when Kappris runs on 64-bit Windows.

In particular, if a customer is using 64-bit Windows with Copitrak prior to v10 than Kappris will not work properly.

See the notes on case 3749 to see what we had to do to get KapprisXPS and copitrak to play nicely together.