Printer stuck on spooling

You’ve hit print, but you arrive at the printer to see no printout. You walk back to your computer and check the status of the print job.

Epson printer spooling but not printing

The print queue shows your stuck job with a status of either “Printing” or “Paused - Spooling”.

You then ask yourself, “What the heck does ‘Printer spooling but not printing’ mean?” Probably shortly followed by quoting Office Space.

The word print appeared in this introduction eight times.

Think of print spoolers like third base coaches in baseball…

What is a print spooler?

The print spooler is a dedicated program/software that essentially manages the order of the documents to proceed to the print queue.

When you select print, your program talks to the print spooler service to work out how to render (or draw) your print job so the printer will understand it and put the colors in the right spots on the page. There are all different types of spoolers in computing (once upon a time there were literal tape spools running inside computers), so the print spooler, you guesse

print job spools but never prints