Front-End Printing on Local Printers
Normally, all printers on which you want to print from the SAP system must be created in the SAP system as output devices. Front-end printing is available to reduce the significant administration effort associated with this. This means that a user logged on to the SAP system through the SAP GUI can use the printers that are set up at his or her front end PC.
A generic output device needs to be created in the SAP system to allow this. If a user specifies this output device for his or her print requests, he or she can select a printer defined at his or her front end.
The following table shows when front-end printing can be used:
| Type of Front-End Printing | Description |
| Front-End Printing (SAP GUI for Windows) | A user that is logged on to the SAP system using the SAP GUI for Windows wants to print on a printer defined in his or her Microsoft Windows host. |
| Front-End Printing (SAP GUI for HTML) | A user that is logged on to the SAP system using the SAP GUI for HTML wants to print on a printer at his or her front end PC. To do this, the document is converted to a PDF file and can be printed from the browser. |
| Front-End Printing (SAP GUI for Java) | Front-end printing with the SAP GUI for Java for non-Windows platforms. |
| Front-End Printing Using a WTS (Windows Terminal Server) | A user that is logged on to the SAP system using the SAP GUI over a Windows Terminal Server wants to print on a printer at his or her front end PC. |
Front-end printing is therefore especially useful in the following cases:
● Users want to print directly at their workstation, without having to create a specific device definition in the SAP system. This is especially the case for users that often work at different work stations or log on to the SAP system on a mobile basis, and want to print at their current location.
● Dynamic IP addresses are used for the front end. Unlike remote printing, you do not require any fixed IP addresses for front-end printing.
Apart this there is constraints apply to front-end printing, due to the special way in which it works:
● You cannot perform front-end printing in the background, as there is not connection to the front end.
● A free session is required for front-end printing, so it must not be the case that all sessions are occupied. However, front-end print requests are not lost if all sessions are occupied, but are temporarily stored in the database.
● Front-end printing should not be used for production or mass printing.
Also you can refer SAP Note 114426, 351492 for more detail about frontend local printing.