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Before anyone can print a physical card, the printer has to be curated — added to your organisation’s list of approved devices. Curating a printer once makes it available to everyone in your organisation who prints, rather than each person configuring their own. You will find this under Admin → Card Printers.
Printers are discovered by the CaptrID Print Service, a small desktop application that runs on the workstation attached to your printer and encoder. It is not a download — contact us and we will provide it.

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How discovery works

The screen has two lists: If Available on this workstation is empty and you see “Local print engine unreachable”, the print service is not running on the machine you are using. Start it, then refresh discovery.
Discovery is per-workstation, but curation is per-organisation. You curate a printer from the machine it is attached to, and from then on it appears in the Print Card dialog for everyone.

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Curating a printer

  1. Start the CaptrID Print Service on the workstation attached to the printer
  2. Open Admin → Card Printers and refresh discovery
  3. Find the printer under Available on this workstation and enable it
  4. Give it a friendly name — something people will recognise, like Front Office ZC300, rather than the model string
Removing a printer takes it out of the curated list. It reappears under Available on this workstation if the engine still finds it, so removing is not permanent.
The Print Card dialog remembers the printer each person last used, so nobody reselects it every time. It is remembered per sign-in, so two people sharing a workstation each keep their own, and it is restored even while that printer is busy with another card. A printer that is switched off is never chosen for you.

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Printer settings

Duplex, ribbon type, card thickness and the rest live in the manufacturer’s own Printing Preferences dialog, not in CaptrID. You can open it straight from the printer’s row under Admin → Card Printers, without starting a print job.
The action is disabled on a workstation that cannot reach the printer, because the dialog opens on the machine the printer is attached to — not on the machine you are browsing from.
These settings apply to every job on that printer, from CaptrID or from any other application. Card printer drivers do not accept per-job settings — the manufacturer’s driver stores them against the printer itself. If you change the ribbon type for one batch, change it back afterwards.

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When the printer needs attention

CaptrID asks the printer before it sends a job, and refuses rather than wasting a card. On brands it can interrogate, you will be told which of these is wrong: the cover is open, there are no cards in the feeder, no ribbon is fitted, the ribbon is used up, or the printer cannot identify its ribbon.
“No ribbon fitted” and “cannot identify its ribbon” are different faults. The first means the carriage is empty. The second means something is in there that the printer cannot read — an unrecognised or third-party ribbon, or one that has not seated properly. Check the ribbon you already have before going to find another.Neither stops a chip-only job such as capturing a card’s serial number, which needs no ribbon.
If a printer stops mid-card — most often because someone opened the cover — CaptrID waits up to ten minutes for it to be dealt with, then finishes the card normally once the printer resumes. Close the cover and the job carries on.
Use CaptrID’s own Reprint, not the printer’s Retry button.Some printers raise their own “Cover open — Retry / Cancel” dialog on the attached workstation. If CaptrID has already given up on that card and you then press Retry there, the printer prints a card that CaptrID has no record of — it will not appear in the person’s card history and cannot be revoked.If the job has already failed in CaptrID, press Cancel on the printer’s dialog and reprint from CaptrID.

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What each brand can do

Every card printer with a Windows driver can print through CaptrID at full quality, including resin black text and two-sided cards. What differs is encoding — writing to a card’s chip or magnetic stripe — because that needs work specific to each manufacturer. Two columns worth reading carefully: “Confirmed by the printer” vs “Sent to the printer.” Where CaptrID can ask the printer directly, it waits for the card to finish and then asks whether anything went wrong — so a cover opened halfway through the card fails the job instead of recording a card that never appeared. Where it cannot ask, Windows only confirms it handed the job to the driver: a jam or an empty hopper after that point is invisible, and the job reports “Sent to the printer” rather than claiming success. Treat those as “probably fine, worth a glance at the output tray”. Even “confirmed” does not prove the card physically reached the output tray — no card printer reports that. It means the printer finished the card and reported no fault, which is as close as the hardware gets. Confirmation is decided per card, not per printer. On the occasional card where the printer could not be reached while the job ran, the result says it cannot be confirmed even on a brand that normally confirms. Seeing both wordings from the same machine is the result being precise about that particular card, not a fault. Evolis chip encoding needs the USB cable. Printing works happily over Ethernet, but the card encoder inside an Evolis is only reachable over USB. A networked Evolis is print-only, which is worth knowing before you plan where it sits.
A printer having the hardware does not mean CaptrID can use it. Several of these models ship with a magnetic encoder fitted, and a Matica will report that it has one — but only Entrust/Datacard can be driven by CaptrID.Zebra is the one that surprises people: the stripe genuinely works on the printer, and if you have encoded one with Zebra’s own software you were not imagining it. CaptrID cannot, because a Zebra takes a fresh card from the hopper to write a stripe — the stripe and the printed design would land on two different cards.The capability shown in the Print Card dialog is always what CaptrID can actually do. A job asking for more is refused before a card is fed, naming what is missing, rather than printing a card with a blank chip or stripe.

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PaperCut integration

If your organisation runs PaperCut NG or MF for print management, CaptrID can write each card’s number straight into PaperCut as it is printed. Staff and students then tap their new ID at the printer and it releases their job — with no one re-keying card numbers into PaperCut by hand.

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Setting it up

You will need your PaperCut server URL and an auth token.
  1. In PaperCut’s Config Editor, find the key auth.webservices.auth-token and set a token
  2. Add the CaptrID print station to Options → Advanced → Allowed XML Web Services callers
  3. In CaptrID, enter the server URL and the token, and run the test
Once a token is stored you can leave the field blank when editing — the test will reuse the saved one. Removing the connection deletes the stored token and stops every list sending card numbers.

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Card number format

This is the part that catches people out. Chip serials are captured as hex, but PaperCut compares card numbers as plain text. If the format does not match what PaperCut expects, the tap will simply not be recognised — the card is fine, the number is fine, and they do not match. CaptrID lets you set the format so the two agree.
Confirm with a physical tap test before relying on it. A wrong format looks exactly like a working setup right up until someone stands at a printer holding a card that does nothing.Print one card, tap it at the printer, and check the job releases. Then do the batch.

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When it sends

Card numbers are sent as cards are printed. There is no separate sync step and no batch to remember to run.

Encoding Profiles

What gets written to the chip

Printing ID Cards

The print wizard itself

Creating Card Templates

Designing what the card looks like

Support

Getting the print service set up