# Managing Universal Printing Settings

To configure RAS Universal Printing, select the **Universal Printing** category in the RAS Console.

By default, the Universal Printing driver is automatically installed together with an RD Session Host Agent, VDI Guest VM Agent, or a Remote PC Agent. Therefore, upon adding a server to the Farm, the Universal Printing is already enabled. The Universal Printing driver is available as a 32 bit and 64 bit version.

### Enabling and disabling Universal Printing support

To enable or disable the Universal Printing support for a server, right-click the server in the **Servers in Site** list and click **Enable** or **Disable** in the context menu.

### Configuring a printer renaming pattern

By default, Parallels RAS renames printers using the following pattern: `%PRINTERNAME% for %USERNAME% by Parallels`. For example, let's say a user named Alice has a local printer named Printer1. When Alice launches a remote application or desktop, her printer is named `Printer1 for Alice by Parallels`.

To change the default printer renaming pattern, select the Universal printing category. On the Universal printing tab, specify a pattern in the **Printer rename pattern** field. To see the predefined variables that you can use, click the **\[...]** button next to the input field. The variables are:

* `%CLIENTNAME% —` the name of the client computer.
* `%PRINTERNAME%` — the name of a printer on the client side.
* `%SESSIONID%` — RAS session ID.
* `%USERNAME%` — the name of the user connected to RAS.
* `<2X Universal Printer>` — This is a legacy mode where only one printer object will be created in the RDP session.

You can also use certain other characters in a printer renaming pattern. For example, you can define the following commonly used pattern: `Client/%CLIENTNAME%#/%PRINTERNAME%`. Using this pattern (and the user named Alice from the example above), a local printer will be named `Client/Alice's Computer#/Printer1`

You can specify a different printer renaming pattern for each server in the **Servers in Site** list.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Note:** Redirected printers are only accessible by the administrator and the user who redirected the printer.
{% endhint %}

### Printer retention

When client-defined printers are redirected to a remote session, it takes time and impacts overall session establishing time. To improve user experience, you can reuse previously created user's printers. To do so, on the **Universal printing** tab, set the **Printer retention** option to **On**.


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