A lot of VT100-compatible terminals support printing under control of the remote server. PuTTY supports this feature as well, but it is turned off by default.
To enable remote-controlled printing, choose a printer from the ‘Printer to send ANSI printer output to’ drop-down list box. This should allow you to select from all the printers you have installed drivers for on your computer. Alternatively, you can type the network name of a networked printer (for example, \\printserver\printer1) even if you haven't already installed a driver for it on your own machine.
When the remote server attempts to print some data, PuTTY will send that data to the printer raw - without translating it, attempting to format it, or doing anything else to it. It is up to you to ensure your remote server knows what type of printer it is talking to.
Since PuTTY sends data to the printer raw, it cannot offer options such as portrait versus landscape, print quality, or paper tray selection. All these things would be done by your PC printer driver (which PuTTY bypasses); if you need them done, you will have to find a way to configure your remote server to do them.
To disable remote printing again, choose ‘None (printing disabled)’ from the printer selection list. This is the default state.
4.4 The Keyboard panel
The Keyboard configuration panel allows you to control the behaviour of the keyboard in PuTTY. The correct state for many of these settings depends on what the server to which PuTTY is connecting expects. With a Unix server, this is likely to depend on the termcap or terminfo entry it uses, which in turn is likely to be controlled by the ‘Terminal-type string’ setting in the Connection panel; see
section 4.14.3
for details. If none of the settings here seems to help, you may find
question A.7.15
to be useful.
•
4.4.1 Changing the action of the Backspace key
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4.4.2 Changing the action of the Home and End keys
•
4.4.3 Changing the action of the function keys and keypad
•
4.4.4 Controlling Application Cursor Keys mode
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4.4.5 Controlling Application Keypad mode
•
4.4.6 Using NetHack keypad mode
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4.4.7 Enabling a DEC-like Compose key
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4.4.8 ‘Control-Alt is different from AltGr’
4.4.1 Changing the action of the Backspace key
Some terminals believe that the Backspace key should send the same thing to the server as Control-H (ASCII code 8). Other terminals believe that the Backspace key should send ASCII code 127 (usually known as Control-?) so that it can be distinguished from Control-H. This option allows you to choose which code PuTTY generates when you press Backspace.
If you are connecting over SSH, PuTTY by default tells the server the value of this option (see
section 4.23.2
), so you may find that
the Backspace key does the right thing either way. Similarly, if you are connecting to a Unix system, you will probably find that the Unix stty command lets you configure which the server expects to see, so again you might not need to change which one PuTTY generates. On other systems, the server's expectation might be fixed and you might have no choice but to configure PuTTY.
If you do have the choice, we recommend configuring PuTTY to generate Control-? and configuring the server to expect it, because that allows applications such as emacs to use Control-H for help.
(Typing Shift-Backspace will cause PuTTY to send whichever code isn't configured here as the default.)
4.4.2 Changing the action of the Home and End keys
The Unix terminal emulator rxvt disagrees with the rest of the world about what character sequences should be sent to the server by the Home and End keys.
xterm, and other terminals, send ESC [1~ for the Home key, and ESC [4~ for the End key. rxvt sends ESC [H for the Home key and ESC [Ow for the End key.
If you find an application on which the Home and End keys aren't working, you could try switching this option to see if it helps.