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The Epson driver has some advanced features that most users don't know how to use or even that they exist. The main one that we will discuss here is the "Print to File" feature.
Saving a spooled file, why would you do it?
The first time I saw a saved spool file was on a CD Epson had sent us of example files to print on the 7600 printer. Rather than include the TIFF or Photoshop document the image was printed from, they had a ZIP archive with a *.prn file inside. At first I was baffled at these files, but I soon realized the reasoning in doing this. First, teaching someone how to use color management is a bear, plus they also need to know how to use Photoshop and other fun stuff. By giving us the spooled file, we didn't even need to HAVE Photoshop, we didn't have to setup the paper size settings, we didn't have to mess with color profiles or calibration. We simply send the spooled file to the printer (it's already spooled so it prints instantly) and suddenly we have the print coming out of the printer exactly how Epson wants it. There's also the issue of the photographer's Copyright. With a spooled file, all we can do is print it. We can't open it in photoshop and change stuff or use it in any way except printing, I'm sure this makes some people very happy.
So how does this concern you?
We have our own Fine Art printing service here, and we often have people come back a few months after we did a job for them, wanting additional prints. In the past we've been pretty good at saving the layered Photoshop documents with the adjustment layers and such in them. The problem is there's no way to save the output profile or the paper settings in a Photoshop or TIFF so we would need to do a bunch of test prints (costly) until we get it looking close to the last ones we did. What if we could save that print on a CD with all the settings embedded into it, ready to go if they want an additional print? It's possible and actually pretty easy to do.
We have two different paths now (I suggest you read both):
The Mac Way
We all know and love this window, don't we? But how many of us have used those little buttons up at the top - besides to run a nozzle check or cleaning cycle? Did you know that the "Utility" button has a configuration screen hidden away in it that allows you to change your spool location? "Why would I want to do that?" you say. Suppose you're like us and your start-up disk only has a few hundred Megabytes left on it because of all the stuff on the desktop, and every time you print a large image your computer slows to a crawl - or it won't even print, whining that there isn't enough space. "Not enough space!?" you say, "but I installed another 80 GB hard drive last week and it's practically empty." By default, when you print, it uses a folder on your start-up disk to spool. Also by default, Photoshop uses your start-up disk as a scratch disk. In a perfect world you would have three separate PHYSICAL hard drives (I'm not talking about partitions, I mean the actual drive hardware): a Start-up drive, a different drive for you Photoshop Scratch (along with a bunch of other stuff like your music collection) and a 3rd one for your print spool. Few people have this setup so don't worry. But if you are having space problems or you want your printing to go faster, you know what to do.
Two other quick things before we get to the "Save to File" feature: background printing and the layout window. While many have argued for years that your print jobs will go faster without background printing enabled, I have yet to ever experience that myself. I dislike having my computer locked up while a job prints and I've even had instances where I was forced to print a job and then quit Photoshop as fast as I could before the print monitor came up because memory was low. At any rate, the "Clock" icon in the main window will bring up a handy window where you can turn on Background Printing, set the time and date you want the print to occur or even have it print "on hold" - this is handy if you want to spool a bunch of images that are going to be printed on different types of paper.
The layout window has a few cool things. I almost always come into this and enable the "Reverse Order" box so I don't have to re-shuffle my multi-page printouts. There are also some controls for fitting an image to a different page size and you can have it print 2 or 4 pages on the same page, or tile a single print across 4 or 9 pages for a large poster.
 Anyway, back into the main window, you'll find a little button just to the left of the "Print" button This lets you switch between 3 states:
 Just click the button twice and you're ready to save your print job! Obviously this is the last step after you've already printed the file at least once and know exactly how you want it. When you click the "SaveFile" button it will ask you where you want the file located. After you click OK, it will bring up the print monitor and "Save Print Data."
To print the file, simply find the saved spool file and double-click it, this will open the Epson Print Monitor with the file on "hold." You can change the number of copies and even open a preview of the print (be aware that colors will be way off and in no way reflect the color balance of the final printed piece).
Because these are raw spool files you might want to run them through DropStuff to compress them if you plan on saving a bunch of them to CD as they tend to get rather large and have a lot of empty space in them.
One note, some of this stuff is available in OSX, most of it is not. It is possible to save your spooled files, but it involves configuring CUPS with a dummy printer and requires knowledge of UNIX and the command line. If you know how to do that sort of thing, you'll have no problem finding the sites that explain how to do it. If you don't and are wondering what CUPS is, I suggest you start exploring the wonderful world of UNIX. One vital tool I simply can't live without is Webmin. It will help you with the CUPS thing (among others).
The Windows Way
Windows also benefits from having it's spool location on a big, open drive. If your system drive is too full, you can change the location if you are running Windows 2000 or XP:
- Open Printers and Faxes.
- On the File menu, click Server Properties, and then click the Advanced tab.
- In the Spool folder window, enter the path and the name of the new default spool folder for this print server, and then click Apply or OK.
- Stop and restart the spooler service, or reboot the computer.
Another thing you should also consider if you want peak performance: move your paging file to a disk other than your system drive (I'm talking about physical drives here, having them on different partitions of the same drive does nothing for you) and having your Photoshop scratch disk on a different drive helps even more.
To save a spooled print job on the PC, just check the "Print to File" box before you print. This will create a .PRN file wherever you select. Be sure to ZIP or RAR these files if you plan on keeping them, most of the time this will trim half of the file size.
The only problem with these spooled files is getting them to print. You can use the DOS "Copy" command to copy them to the LPT1 port, but it gets sticky when you have network or USB printers. We found a great freeware program called "Send to Printer" which takes care of this for you: find the spooled file, select your printer and go!
So now you can save your print jobs for the future and reproduce your prints exactly the same way, every time. One fun this I discovered while researching all this is that you can save a file on a Mac with a .prn extension and it can be printed on a PC perfectly as long as you used the correct print driver on the Mac when creating it. Some universities actually use this method for submitting print jobs. You cannot, however, create a .prn file on the PC and print it on the Mac because the mac version seems to embed which printer to use and such, whereas the PC version doesn't - forcing you to select the printer when you send the data.
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