RPM Remote Print Manager Development Roadmap

This page lists the features and issues that were resolved in each minor release of RPM Remote Print Manager™ beginning with version 4.5.0.1 and continuing to the current version of RPM.

Our updates and new releases are customer-driven, please contact us for any feature enhancement ideas or needs.

RPM 5.0.70.6

December 28, 2009

• RPM Elite version 5.0 is now released! Please see the RPM Elite comparison page for information on what has been added
• Speed improvements for very large jobs
• RPM now performs disk space checks prior to receiving and printing jobs and other disk operations
• We've added auto-calc layout to the text markup transform. This eliminates the requirement to include a text markup transform before you text print, create PDF, and many other situations. The text print action, the PDF transfor and several others will automatially include a text markup transform if the incoming data appears to be plain text. Instead of defaulting to 6 lines per inch, the text markup transform will examine the incoming data and attempt to determine a good fit for line length and page length. This setting is also available in the text markup dialog.
• The filter action now supports tracking process idle time (for the entire process tree) and terminating filter programs which have hung; and saving the standard error log
• Added seach for log entries
• Improvements to importing registry files from previous versions of RPM, including recognizing printer pools
• The ASA transform was not specifying the font name
• PCL code removal bug on buffer boundaries, some codes were not removed
• If RPM warns about unrecognized control file lines, it now tells you what the unknown charater is, though it still does not affect printing
• We refactored how RPM processes LPR control files, which resolves some unusual bugs
• The duplex setting in the PCL transform now works correctly
• Scheduler fixex includes:
  • If you had many held jobs and released them all at once, some wouldn't print. This was due to a race condition between scheduling the job and setting the "held" attribute to zero.
  • If you released very large numbers of jobs, randomly some would not print.
• Text markup to PDF changes include:
  • Very large PDF files were truncated. It turns out that if you need to make more than 8191 pages, you need to set this at the beginning.
  • Improvements to memory usage for very large files
  • Word wrap was not working correctly in the PDF transform.
• Telnet protocl changes include:
  • Added support for the job user
  • The job format control now lists job data relevant to telnet, not the entire LPR list
  • You can now edit the default "quiet print" setting
  • Changed the way telnet timeouts are logged; basically, they aren't
• GUI changes include:
  • The queues list now shows queues without actions with an empty (black and white) printer icon.
  • The job properties dialog how supports start and end page
  • The jobs list now includes a column for the error message
  • The device properties dialog now supports setting the maximum use count, and manually resetting device error
  • The device panel now includes the maximum and current use counts
  • The PCL banner transform can now act as a page separator by drawing from an input tray, and by printing a blank page instead of job data
  • certain controls hung on Windows 2000; these were refactored
  • added support for moving jobs from one queue to another as opposed to copying
  • in the string translator, regular expression support is now optional
  • increased resolution for margins and line settings in the text markup dialog
  • if you selected many jobs in the job list, then deleted, or reprinted, or held (anything you can do to multiple jobs) RPM would frequently complain about an empty list of jobs failing. This now works as expected and fairly quickly.
  • Added a queue description to the Queue Status panel
  • Swapped actions and transforms in the Queue Status panel, and lambelled them more clearly

RPM 5.0.70.4

March 17th, 2009

• All files in the temp folder are removed on startup.
• All files in the spool folder which are not associated with jobs are removed on startup.
• When printing raw, if RPM can't open the printer with full access, we try the partial "print only" access. Some users don't have full access to their printers; they won't be able to set the print job user name or document name for the Windows spooler, but they'll be able to print.
• Added a script and a program to shrink the database after making a backup. The sevice will be stopped during this operation.
• Added a script and a program to scan the database and make repairs if needed. The service will be stopped during this operation.
• Certain errors in actions weren't showing up in the device or the job, so you'd see an error status, but not know why. This has been improved.
• Device errors are logged once, rather than multiple times.
• If you drag a job onto the UI, or add jobs by importing the old RPM registry file, the jobs wouldn't print if the queue was suspended and you resumed it.
• Added more logging so if you reprint a job and nothing happens, you'll be able to determine the reason.
• Added logging so you could see the progress of the device tester, which works on devices in the error state.
• Fixed the JOBATTRS index problem that occasionally shows up in the Windows event log.
• In the email action, if you had two or more recipients in the same domain, they could receive duplicate emails. This may be related to Exchange. At any rate, it's now fixed.
• RPM was giving incorrect results for lines that contained only space, bold and underscore. This is now fixed.
• Replaced the PCL removal transform with one that is more lenient regarding incomplete or unexpected PCL sequences.
• Added a log message for text printing which shows the actual hardware margins; also added socket info to some of the LPD messages.
• Added a test so if the database copy on startup failed to write the correct number of bytes, this action would prevent us from opening the database.
• Certain unexpected LPD errors were causing a "bad lexical cast" error. This situation is now logged and handled cleanly.
• You can now specify a numeric font id for PCL fonts, in the user interface. This way you should be able to select any font your printer supports.
• Added font spacing support to PCL. If you are using a fixed font like Courier, you can leave the spacing at the default, which is "fixed". If you are using a proportional font, you must change the spacing in order to get your requested font. This applies to the "text markup to PCL" and the PCL banner transforms.
• Fixed a bug where, if you had multiple actions and "copies" were set to 1, when the first action completed the job would be marked as "complete".
• Fixed issue with EBCDIC code page IBM1140 which would log an error and not complete.
• EBCDIC code page CP011 has also been added as a French Canadian variant on IBM037.
• If RPM prints landscape to a text printer that is set to portrait, the "top" (right) margin is now set correctly. It was too large.
• Another landscape related issue: if your print job was using characters per line, or lines per page, the text print action was using the wrong metrics. This is now fixed.
• Added more detailed logging to track down port-related errors.
• If we run into "device limit exceeded", this is now logged once per device, not for each time the device is considered for a job (which could be a lot). Also, the device status is set to "Device limit exceeded".
• If the installer finds rpmcfg.reg, a configuration file from RPM 4.5, it now waits for the service to start before continuing, and renames the file afterward so the file is not imported again during an upgrade.
• The email action now supports the print job as the message body as an option, instead of attaching. Only plain text and HTML are supported for this.
• You can now use job data in the subject line of an email message. You'll notice it has the same "Format" button that the attachment uses. The default subject is "<subject>" which you'll probably want to change.
• We fixed a bug in text printing where underlined text could be moved to the end of the line.
• RPM now gets the MAC address(es) defined on your computer on startup, and checks them with what it has seen before. If the primary MAC address has changed, then most likely the licensing will also be affected. This will let you know when we detect this change. Changes in the IP address(es) are also noted.
• In the user interface import of registry files, if the "queue type" was raw and you had an SCS action, we now add a "strip markup" action. This is in keeping with the old RPM's behavior. If you would rather print PCL to a printer than plain text, you might want to remove that strip markup transform and add a PCL transform.
• If Terminal Services is not running, or if the RPM process can't query it, we'll let you know that interactive processes will not run until this is corrected.

RPM 5.0.70.3

January 14th, 2009

• The user interface now starts reliably. You should no longer see "license.get()" or related messages. If the service truly is not running, you'll still see a message about that.
• If you sent a very large telnet job, it would fail with "Bad allocation" and start a new job. That is fixed.
• If you had a queue with a number of archived jobs, suspend the queue, send more jobs, then resume the queue, the archived jobs would reprint, not just the new jobs. That is fixed.
• If a queue had two or more copy actions, the filenames they used to copy to would be identical and occasionally an error "file exists" would happen. This is fixed. The filename now has the action instance id, which is unique. The other job properties are unaffected.
• The telnet protocol is supposed to direct jobs to a queue; if this queue was removed, the telnet protocol would signal an error. It now creates a queue named "telnet_" followed by the port number, and uses that. The queue will remain suspended until it is configured in the UI.
• The email job action is now more robust in handling multiple "to" addresses; also, addresses can be separated by comma or semicolon.
• The install program now handles the case where the currently installed version is the same as what you are trying to install; you can decide whether or not to go forward.
• Importing a configuration from the old RPM could result in an internal error in the UI. The symptom was that only some of the queues were created. This is resolved.
• Addressed contention due to parallel updates in the RPM database, for instance, two completed print jobs updating the device
• The "archive to folder" action is now logged at normal detail.

RPM 5.0.70.1

December 12th, 2008

• When deleting a queue, all settings for every transform were removed, not just for the specific queue.
• When upgrading to the same version, the window would immediately disappear without performing the upgrade.

RPM 5.0.70.0

November 10th, 2008

Enhancements

Bug fixes (these problems are all fixed)

RPM 5.0.67.0

August 15th, 2008

• The email message body was blank; that is fixed
• RPM is now using horizontal positioning hints for SCS files. If the print file includes AHPP commands, we use those with text printing. This affects languages such as Thai where a line of text may be shorter than the number of characters it contains, which throws spacing off.
• We have dropped the requirement that the logged in user must be an administrator, in order to change things in RPM. However, you can still enforce that requirement if you want. You have to be logged in as an admin user in order to set that.

RPM 5.0.66.0

July 31st, 2008

• In the character set conversion transform, if you were converting to UTF-8, the transform would occassionally show an error and incorrectly report it for the input code page. Both problems were fixed.
• Substantial work was done in the SCS transform to handle wide characters.
• A problem with the user interface preventing actions from importing was resolved.
• The text print action was not working correctly with the output of the COR transform in some cases. COR was fixed.
• Fixed issue where the log would incorrectly show that the device didn't exist while adding or changing credentials.
• A recent change prevented the characters per inch setting in the text markup action and SCS, ASA, and text markup dialogs from working. This was resolved.
• It was reported that RPM could fail to archive a file on a shared drive, writing it on the root folder instead. We were unable to reproduce this but attempted to resolve it.
• The UI incorrectly displayed a setting in the Job Archive dialog. This has been resolved.
• RPM now logs filter commands at normal detail, and options such as stdin on high detail.
• Resolved issue with the filter transform not reporting the control file location correctly. Forward slashes were used instead of backslashes.

RPM 5.0.65.0

July 14th, 2008

• Fixed issue adding ports. The ports dialog was not accessible.
• Resolved SCS issue where, depending on the SCS command used to move to the next line, the buffer could have been lost.
• Added code page IBM-Thai (IBM838).

RPM 5.0.63.0

July 3rd, 2008

• In the UI, you could not enter 1.0 as the value of any margin. The dialog now uses a more intuitive input field.
• Fixed issue where data that did not end in a new line or form feed character would cause the string translator to drop the last line.
• Raw printing no longer truncates output.

RPM 5.0.62.0

June 12th, 2008

• Security checking now supports wildcards in hostnames or IP addresses
• Fixed socket issue which occasionally caused RPM to output too many jobs
• Some transforms improved to support byte level regular expressions (\xNN) properly
• Email validator now allows the period (.) to be used as part of an email address

RPM 5.0.59.0

May 27th, 2008

User Interface

• Drag and drop files into RPM queues
• Drag and drop print jobs between queues
• Easily duplicate queues with copy and paste operations
• Import queue configuration from any RPM version
• Select multiple queues or jobs simultaneously
• View contents of print files with included hexadecimal viewer
• More intuitive host access configuration
• Improved log window with sortable columns
• Better file naming options
• • More intuitive configuration
  • The append to file feature can create new files yearly, monthly, daily, and hourly

Service

• Improved LPD support:
• • Better handling of multiple print jobs on a single connection
  • Increased speed while receiving print jobs
  • Support for a wider variety of print clients
• Page count estimate is displayed on incoming print jobs
• Multi-threaded output
• Security: each action can have its own user credentials, no longer need to run the server as a privileged user
• Fully customizable print job workflow
• Improvements to existing actions: text, raw, filter, and archive
• The text printing action fully supports UTF-8
• Specify number of copies when raw printing
• Added ability to email print jobs
• Added the ability to perform multiple actions on incoming print jobs (save and print, broadcast print)
• Print job archiving
• Reprint jobs
• Added a number of data filtering options
• Supports PDF, PCL, and HTML output
• PDF supports international character sets including Asian languages
• String translations
• Supports variety of custom banner pages
• Computer Output Reduction (COR) adds the ability to automatically rotate from portrait to landscape and scale the font size
• Added support for more SNA Character Set (SCS) commands
• Supports a wider variety of code pages, including double-byte character sets (DBCS)
• Added support to break lines at a configurable width
• Specify page range on each queue
• • Limit the maximum number of pages on incoming print jobs
  • Eliminate banner pages created on the host system
• Customize the location of the Spool folder

RPM 4.5.1.12

February 2, 2008

• Resolved a buffer overflow security vulnerability during the receive data file LPD subcommand. This issue was originally report by Luigi Auriemma here.

RPM 4.5.1.11

November 12, 2004

• RPM now installs and uninstalls correctly on systems running Windows XP SP2
• The setup program has been signed with a digital certificate
• Remote Print Administrator for RPM Elite is signed with a digital certificate for better integration with Windows Server 2003
• The EBCDIC table has been updated (character 0x9F is converted to 0x80 [euro])

RPM 4.5.1.9

October 23, 2003

• Corrected a problem upon startup when the license was validated.
• Improved communication between the user interface and the service.

RPM 4.5.1.8

September 17, 2003

• Resolved issue with text queues where banner page overwrote the first page of the print job.
• Corrected a problem with the translate LF to CR/LF function where extra carriage returns were added in the print job.
• RPM now saves the windows that were opened previously; the same windows come up next time RPM is started.
• When calling a filter program and %s is not specified in the command line, RPM now inserts the path to the data file as documented.
• Resolved an issue when specifying an alternate location to save control files.
• RPM now determines the largest available buffer size per TCP/IP connection and uses it, improving speed when receiving large files.
• Some files with embedded null characters were printed incorrectly; this was also causing ASA translation issues.

RPM 4.5.0.4

November 12, 2002

• Remove PCL codes option has been enhanced to remove all PCL codes, including graphics.
• Batch files are now shown by default when browsing for filter programs.
• Some files and folders were not properly removed during uninstallation.
• Users can now successfully specify a range of pages to print.
• RPM Elite could not be upgraded to unlimited printers.

RPM 4.5.0.3

October 08, 2002

• Queue List window can now be sorted on the title column; before it would not sort properly.
• RPM installation failed on Windows NT with service pack 5 or earlier during dll registrations.
• Queues were not always listed in the Queue List window after upgrading from previous versions.
• Print jobs and queues with uppercase letters were not displayed properly in the Queue List window.
• Some escape sequences that were not true PCL, but similar, were improperly removed.
• When renaming and deleting a queue, the Queue List window was not properly refreshed.
• The license manager and RPM user interfaces could not be opened by anyone other than a member of the Administrators group.
• Export configuration was not properly handling file paths, either during uninstallation or when called from the File menu.
• When receiving multiple copies of a print job, not all copies were printed and RPM logged warning messages.
• From the Brooks License Manager (BLM), copying to clipboard and printing license information would not work properly, and license information was not displayed properly in the BLM user interface for non-English languages.
• You can now specify the folder for saving control files on a per queue basis as well as globally.
• The printer limit during trial was increased from 2 to 5 on RPM Select.
• Printer module shows actual printers instead of additional printers. The module quantity can now be increased during trial as well, but is reset to the appropriate amount during licensing or after the module expires.
• Brooks License Manager now allows editing of proxy settings; before it silently used the proxy information defined in Internet Explorer if a normal connection could not be made.
• RPA can now be accessed securely using secure socket layers (SSL). An example is https://your.website.com/rpm.
• Various issues with upgrading from RPM 2.3/3.0 NT versions were resolved.

RPM 4.5.0.1

August 14, 2002

• Remote Print Administrator added to allow RPM to be configured remotely; this requires IIS on the RPM host and a browser at a client computer.
• Software license manager enhanced for relicensing software and connecting through proxy servers.
• Queue Status window would not display job names longer than 16 characters. It has now been increased to 40.
• Many default settings modified in text queues and filter queues to support recent changes in many operating systems.
• Added support for importing and exporting configuration. This is done from the File menu.
• Support for specifying the destination folder of the control file information.
• Added banner page support for all queue types. Previously was only allowed in raw and text type queues.
• When printing a banner and inserting files or bytes, the file or bytes were inserted only after the banner. RPM now provides a way to select where the information is inserted.
• The Report2Web style was updated to support the most current version of Report2Web. All versions are supported, but must be modified for previous versions.
• Opening the Queue Status window after it was closed manually caused too many spaces between print job information.
• When configuring RPM to preserve more than 7 days of log files, only 7 logfiles were saved.
• Some tabbed dialogs were not using the system colors, but instead were forced to a gray color.
• Some blank pages were printed whether the suppress blank pages setting was selected or not.