HP PaintJet XL printer
ITEM: RTA000065161
HP PAINTJET XL - Problem Description
-------------------------------------
We have a customer who needs to connect an HP PAINTJET XL
printer to an RS/6000 model 41T running AIX 3.2.5 . He has
an application that has been developed on APOLLO machines
and ported to AIX. The application creates PCL data and
sends it directly to the parallel port (without using a
temporary file and/or sending a print request to a queue).
When he tries to print from the AIX application, it doesn't
work correctly: Titles which are supposed to be printed bold
are printed twice; images are split into several pages instead
of being printed on one page (redundant Form Feeds), and so on.
We tried to define a virtual printer and send the raw data to
the parallel port (using the _d=p paramter in the printer colon
file). We also tried to connect the printer to the serial port
using RS-232 interface and use the tty driver in raw mode,
but we keep getting the same results. Is there any way to
configure the HP PAINTJET XL printer under AIX 3.2.5 ?
ANSWER
Unfortunately, the HP PAINTJET XL printer is unsupported on AIX.
If this printer is attachable to the parallel port on the RISC
System/6000, you may wish to use the "Other Parallel Printer"
(OPP) device driver. In other to determine the cause of this
problem, we would need to do the following problem isolation
tests:
1. What device driver is being used with this printer (i.e.
OPP, HP LaserJet, etc.)? If this printer does not have the
capability to emulate any of the printer that AIX supports,
use the "Other Parallel Printer" device driver.
2. Since the application does not print through AIX queueing
subsystem, a virtual printer is not needed. I would suggest
that you set the device driver to pass-through mode. The
following command will put the device driver into pass-
through mode:
splp -p+ lp#
You can verify that the device drive is set to pass-through
mode by issuing the command:
splp lp#
Where lp# is the lp device number (i.e. lp0, lp1, etc.).
3. If the suggestion above does not work, try redirecting the
file to the printer from AIX command line (not from the AIX
application) using the following command:
cat file_name > /dev/lp#
Do you get the same formatting problem? If yes, go to step
4. If not, see step 5.
4. Check the HP PAINTJET XL printer to see if it is being set
up for any type of formatting. Also, redirect an AIX file
(not the files that generated by this application) to the
printer (a good example of an AIX file would be /etc/motd
or /etc/inittab) to see if you have the same problem.
5. It may be possible that the APOLLO based application is not
fully compatible when ported onto AIX. What you can do is
to have the application send the print job to a file instead
directly to the printer port. Then, you can view this file
to see if the application is formatting the print job
correctly.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
HP PAINTJET XL PRINTER
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000065161 ITEM: RTA000065161
Dated: 01/1995 Category: ITSAI6000HW
This HTML file was generated 99/06/24~12:43:24
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