Citrix Printing Terms

Client Printers: Any printer available to a user before an ICA session is launched.

Client Local Printer: Printers that are physically connected to client devices through LPT, COM, or TCP ports.

Client Network Printer: A network printer that appears in the Printers and Faxes folder of a client device and is managed by a print server. This differs from a print device attached to a standard TCP/IP port.

Autocreated Printers: Client local or network printers that appear for the user within an ICA session and use the ICA protocol to send a print job. Autocreated printers use the ICA printer naming convention.

Autoconnected Printers: Printer that are defined for users in their ICA sessions based off the list of network printers defined on the client machine, but are connected directly to the print server. During session initialization, the server attempts to map directly to the print server using the credentials of the user that initiated the ICA session. If the server is unable to establish a direct connection to the location, the printer is autocreated in the session instead of being autoconnected. When a printer is autoconnected, the print job is sent directly from the server running Presentation Server, bypassing the client device, to the specified print server outside of the ICA session.

Autoretained Printers: These are client printers that are added by the user within an ICA session through the Add Printer wizard by browsing and connecting to printers enumerated through the client network print provider. When re-creating a retained printer, all Citrix policies except the autocreation policy are respected. This means that retained client printers are created exactly as the autocreation policy would have selected them. Such printers continue to be re-created with every logon from the same client until the client printer within the session is deleted manually or the remembered printer connection is removed from the client’s properties store. On a Windows client, the properties store can be found in the user profile under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Citrix\PrinterProperties

Autorestored Printers: A manually created client printer attached to a standard client printer port. This kind of printer can be created by an administrator or power user running the Add Printer wizard and manually creating a local printer that is attached to a standard client printer port. These printers are deleted when logging off and re-created during a logon.
Unmanaged Printer: Permanent printers attached to legacy client printer ports. Both the port and printer become permanent fixtures on the server that they are created on. Whenever the specific client is not connected to the server, the port is marked offline. However, if a session is opened from the client, the port is marked online and any queued print jobs begin to print on the specific client printer.

Session Printers: Network printers shared by a print server that are discovered and attached through a session printing policy.

Citrix Universal Print Driver (UPD): A single driver that is installed and configured on the server to which an administrator can assign to all client autocreated printers. This allows for an administrator to not have to manage, install, and duplicate a potentially large set of third-party print drivers through the server farm.

Citrix Universal Printer: A single generic printer using the Citrix Universal Print Driver. It is mapped within each session and is not bound to any printer defined on the client device. It is not enabled by default.

Legacy-style Client Printer Port: The printer ports used by printers created using the legacy naming convention. Such ports are tied to the client workstation by name.
The naming convention is as follows:
\\
Where is the name of the client workstation and is the name of the printer on the client.

Standard-style Client Printer Port: The printer ports used by printers created using the standard naming convention. Such printers are tied to the client workstation by Terminal Services session ID.
The naming convention is as follows:
::
Where is the session ID number of an active session and is the name of the printer on the client.

Citrix Print Manager Service (cpsvc.exe): Provides printer management for all ICA sessions including printer policy enforcement, driver installation, client printer port management, auto-creation of network and client printers, and printer/port cleanup when logging off.