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The print queue timeline: see your whole farm on a Gantt chart

The print queue timeline: see your whole farm on a Gantt chart


The Timeline tab turns your print queue into a live Gantt chart on a real calendar, so you can see exactly what every printer is doing now, what runs next, and when the whole queue will be finished. This guide explains what the timeline shows, the two ways to read it, how the "until all done" estimate is calculated, and the controls that make it work on a wall screen.


The print queue timeline is part of the Print Farm plan and up (Print Farm, School and Enterprise). The print queue itself starts on the Pro plan.


The timeline is one of the three tabs at the top of your print queue, next to Queue and To-Do. If you run more than a couple of printers, it is the fastest way to answer "are we going to hit the deadline?" without doing the maths in your head.


What's on this page


The print queue Timeline tab showing a Gantt chart of queued and printing jobs across a date range, with stat cards for prints queued, printing now, printers active and until all done


What the timeline shows

The timeline is a live Gantt chart of every queued and printing job, laid out on a real calendar with dates and times along the top. Each bar is a piece of work, positioned where it actually falls in time and sized to how long it takes. Jobs that are running right now, jobs that are waiting, and jobs that already finished all sit on the same canvas.


It updates as your farm runs. When a printer picks up its next item, finishes a print, or a bed gets cleared, the chart reflows so the picture in front of you stays honest. Nothing here is a guess you have to maintain by hand - SimplyPrint reads the queue, your printers and your settings and draws the schedule for you.


The point of the view is to see the whole operation at a glance. Instead of clicking through individual printers to work out where you stand, you get one screen that shows the shape of the next few hours or days.


Queue items mode vs Printers mode

There are two ways to read the same schedule. Switch between them with the Queue items / Printers toggle in the toolbar.


Queue items mode gives each queue item its own row. Because an item can have several copies running on several printers at once, the row shows where each of those copies is scheduled. This is the view you want when you are thinking in terms of orders or parts: "where is item #5 up to, and how many machines are working on it?"


Printers mode gives each printer its own row. The row shows what that printer is doing now and what it picks up next, one machine at a time. This is the view you want when you are thinking in terms of hardware: "what is each printer busy with, and which ones are about to free up?"


Both modes draw from the same queue and the same estimates, so they always agree. Pick whichever matches the question you are asking.


The stat cards

A row of stat cards sits above the chart and summarises the whole queue at a glance:


  • Prints queued - how many prints are lined up across the queue.
  • Printing now - how many prints are currently running.
  • Printers active - how many of your printers are working, shown as active out of total (for example 121/142).
  • Until all done - a real estimate of how long it will take to finish everything currently in the queue.


That last card is the headline number. It answers the question every farm asks first: if nothing else comes in, when are we done?


How the "until all done" estimate works

The "until all done" figure is not a naive "add up all the print times" number. It is a forward simulation of how your queue will actually run, so it accounts for the things that make real schedules longer than the raw print time.


It factors in:


  • Printer compatibility - which printers can actually run each item. An item only counts against the printers that match its filament, nozzle, bed type and assignment, so the estimate reflects the real capacity available to it rather than your total printer count.
  • Bed-clear time - how long it takes to clear a bed and start the next job. A printer is not instantly free the moment a print ends, so the estimate includes the turnaround time you have configured (per printer or for the whole account).
  • Working hours - the hours your account is staffed, when someone is actually around to clear beds. The estimate shades the hours you are not staffed and never assumes a bed gets cleared at 3am. A print that ends overnight does not free its printer until the next staffed window, and the number reflects that.


The result is an honest end time rather than an optimistic one. If you want to change the inputs - your staffed hours, or how long a bed clear takes - those live in your working-hours settings. See working hours and expected finish times for how to set them, since they drive this estimate and the per-item finish times.


Reading the bars: status colours and shaded hours

The bars are colour-coded so you can scan the chart and immediately see what is happening. The legend along the bottom of the timeline spells out each one:


  • Printing - a job that is currently running.
  • Auto-clearing - a bed that is clearing itself automatically before the next job.
  • Needs manual clearing - a bed that someone has to clear before the printer can pick up its next item.
  • Unknown duration - a job whose print time SimplyPrint cannot estimate yet.
  • Complete - a job that has finished.
  • Failed - a job that did not finish successfully.


Deadlines add two more markers on top of those bars: Past deadline flags a job scheduled to finish after its deadline, and Tight deadline flags one that is cutting it close.


Hours outside your working hours are shaded on the chart as well. That shading is the visual side of the same logic the "until all done" estimate uses: it shows you the windows where nobody is staffed to clear a bed, which is why a bar can sit idle across the night and only continue once your next shift starts. If a long stretch of your week is shaded and your finish time looks far out, that is usually the staffed-hours window talking, not the printers.


If you are an admin and the shaded hours or turnaround times look wrong, you can jump straight to the settings from the timeline's overflow "..." (More) menu, which opens Working hours and Turnaround time.


Deadlines and completed jobs

If you use queue item deadlines, they show up on the timeline as markers, so you can see at a glance whether a job is scheduled to finish before or after its deadline. A bar that runs past its deadline marker is the early warning you want, while there is still time to add capacity or re-order the queue.


Completed jobs stay visible on the chart for roughly the last 7 days rather than vanishing the moment they finish. That gives you a recent running history right on the timeline: you can scroll back across the calendar and see what actually ran and when, not just what is coming up.


Day, Week and Today

Use the Day and Week buttons in the top-right to change how much of the calendar you see at once. Week is the right zoom for planning a farm across several days; Day is better when you want to read individual jobs hour by hour.


The Today button jumps the view back to the current date, and the arrow buttons next to it step the calendar forward and back so you can look ahead at what is coming or back at what has run. The date range above the chart always tells you which window you are looking at.


Fullscreen, refresh and Follow now

A few controls make the timeline work as an always-on board, not just something you open for a minute:


  • Fullscreen expands the timeline to fill the screen. Put it on a monitor on the shop floor and the whole team can see the schedule, the deadlines and the "until all done" number without logging in to anything.
  • Refresh and auto-refresh keep the data current. You can refresh on demand, and auto-refresh keeps a wall screen up to date on its own so the board never goes stale.
  • Follow now keeps the view tracking the current moment as time passes, so "now" stays in frame instead of scrolling off the left edge. It is the setting you want for a screen that stays up all day.


Together these turn the timeline into a live status board for the room.


Simulate AutoPrint

The Simulate AutoPrint control lets you preview how your queue would play out if AutoPrint kept feeding printers automatically. It runs the same matching and distribution logic forward and lays the result on the timeline, so you can see the projected schedule before committing to it.


This is a useful sanity check when you are setting up automation or changing your scheduling and distribution settings. If a change to your scheduling mode or printer distribution would reshape the schedule, the simulation shows you the effect on the chart rather than leaving you to find out once jobs are already running.



Updated on: 24/06/2026

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