Sharing Ticket Printers

If you wish to share a ticket printer amongst Windows and/or Mac OSX machines, the recommended solution is a printer with an ethernet card built into it.

Note: Arts Management Systems only supports sharing ticket printers if they are IP based. We do not support sharing parallel printers using the Net Use technique for Vista or earlier. If you cannot get the technique to work, please contact Microsoft.

Net Use for Parallel printers (not supported)

Net Use solution is NOT supported by Arts Management Systems.

Use IP based printers instead.

Note: this technique only works with NT, 2000, XP pro and Vista. It does not work with:
  • Windows 7 or later because Microsoft did not implement the 'net use' command the same.
  • non professional versions of XP
  • if you attempt to share printers and you are using Theatre Manager via Remote Desktop.
    • Again, please ask Microsoft why.

Historically, sharing can be done amongst Windows only computers with an LPT port using a feature called NET USE available in some versions of Windows older than Vista. Alternatively, you could print when two computers that are side by side in the box office using an electronic A/B switch (means it automatically switches LPT1 depending on who is printing).

If you opt for the software solution, it works like this:

  • Give the computer a name like BoxOffice1 (notice, no spaces). each computer must have a unique name, so the other ones can be called BoxOffice2, etc.
  • Set up a 'generic text/only' printer driver for LPT1 (or LPT2 or LPT3) on the machine with the ticket printer
  • Make this printer shared and give it a convenient name like TixPrnt1 (8 characters and no spaces works best)
  • On all other machines that are to print on this printer, start the 'DOS' command prompt and do a command that looks like:

    net use lptx: \\ComputerWithPrinter\PrinterName /Persistent:yes

    using the example above, the command would look like

    net use lpt2: \\BoxOffce1\TixPrnt1 /Persistent:yes

    This will redirect lpt2 on a computer to the machine with the ticket printer. The advantage of this is that is it easily configurable and you can use more than one of these commands on any machine to allow it to point to any ticket printer on the network.

  • Now, in the employee preferences for the user of the second computer, you need to indicate that they print to LPT2. When a ticket is printed, it will be routed through the network to the BoxOffice1 computer. It is generally about that easy in practice.

To remove the ticket printer connection on a workstation

Using the example above

net use lptx: /delete

For more information on how the net use command works use the Windows help/ Go to start >> help. And do a search for "net use"