How can I determine the status of the printer programmatically?

Last Modification: December 11, 1999

The answer has several parts. The good part is that calling GetPrinter() at level 2 will return the printer status in PRINTER_INFO_2::Status. The bad part is twofold: While on Win9x you can get detailed information of the printer status in this member, on WinNT you'll only find out if the printer is paused or pending deletion, which is obviously not enough.

To further complicate things, it turns out that Windows only queries the printer for its status when there's a print job for the it, which means that if you are not printing you probably can't find out the real printer status. If you are not concerned about this, you'll be glad to know that you can obtain the same information on WinNT and Win9x by querying the print job instead of the printer for the status, via the GetJob() api.

References and samples:

Knowledge Base Article Q160129: "How To Get The Status of a Printer and a Print Job"