Ready to produce and the print queue

The two production screens, and what their numbers mean. For the print room’s daily routine and consumables, see the print room guide.

Ready to produce

This list is one sentence long: everyone whose current photo is approved but not yet on a card. A new starter whose photo just passed review appears here; so does an existing card holder whose new photo was approved (the row says which card the reprint will replace). As soon as a card is queued from that photo, the row disappears, so nothing can be produced twice by accident.

Each row offers the action that fits how your organisation works: Print (walk-up organisations, straight to the printer) or Add to order (batch organisations, added to a draft order), plus Digital ID for a phone wallet pass. Digital ID is disabled, with the reason shown, when the person has no email address.

Rows waiting more than a week are marked in red. The same count is the badge in the menu, so an empty badge means nobody is waiting.

The print queue

Production → Print queue, where jobs meet printers.

Tiles across the top count jobs by state: Queued (waiting for a printer), Claimed (a print agent has taken it), Printing (the card is in the machine), Printed, Failed, and the total. Failed jobs have their own table with Retry and Dismiss: a retry queues the same card again, a dismiss withdraws it.

Each printer has a status card: online or offline, its current state (including “Standby, asleep until the next card”, which is normal for an idle ZXP Series 7), ribbon remaining and type, and cards printed since the last clean, with an alert when a clean is overdue. A printer that misses its check-in for three minutes is marked offline and operators are emailed.

How jobs reach a printer

The portal never sends anything to a printer directly. The print agent beside the printer asks for work, claims queued jobs for its own printers, downloads the artwork, prints, and reports back. A claimed job that stops being renewed (the agent stopped, the PC restarted) returns to the queue within five minutes. Nothing is lost; it waits for the next claim.

Spoils and reprints

The card jammed, printed crooked, or the ribbon ran out halfway. Mark the printed job spoiled. A reason is required, because the reason is what keeps the consumables and billing figures honest. That one action records the spoil against the run, logs the wasted ribbon panel, and queues the replacement automatically on the same printer. You never rebuild an order because a card jammed.

Destroy spoiled cards. For walk-up printing’s version (free misprint reprints), see Walk-up printing.

Print now

A submitted order can be sent straight to a printer with Print now, without building a run. It queues only cards whose artwork has finished rendering and that have never been queued before, and its messages say exactly which condition stopped a card. “No artwork yet, wait for rendering” is a different problem from “no printer is enrolled”, and the screen keeps them apart.

The downloads for the print agent and the encoder agent are under Settings → Downloads.