TCP-IP printing

[Jan Smit]

I've managed to add a printer on a NT 4 workstation and HP-UX 10.20 and 9.0 on Hp9000 807 and 370 machines are able to print to it using remote printer (HP laserjet 6P) on the NT's IP address.

The problem is that it will only print on letter size paper setting whereas in South Africa the a4 is the standard. The result is that the page feeds are all wrong when printing on a4 paper. Also I cannot send graphics to the printer. There is no place where I can tell HP-UX that the printer has a4 paper and graphic capabilities.

On Linux redhat 6.2 I could set this and it prints fine.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi Jan
Does this occur with the printer set to default A4 size?

Paula

[John Waller]

Jan,
Could you explain a bit more about the way the printer is set up. You mentioned you have setup the printer on a NT4 workstation and also on HP-UX 10.20 and 9.00 boxes. Is the printer connected locally to the NT workstation or is it a network printer connected using an HP JetDirect.

The reason for asking this question is due to the remote printer model on the HP-UX system. From my experience in the past, when setting a remote printer on HP-UX it presumes that you are sending the request to a print server which has the exact printer type defined (e.g HP Laserjet 6). The HP print system just uses a plain printer model which has no intelligence and expects the remote printer server to do all the formatting work.

If the printer is connnected to the network via a JetDirect I would recommend using the "jetadmin" product available on HP-UX. When you add a printer using jetadmin you select the type of printer you are using so the HP system then formats the job accordingly.

If the printer is connected locally to the NT system then you may need to lok at the settings on teh NT box as it will be this box which controls how the printer works.

Sorry I can't be more specific but I am not sure on the connectivity and setup of your non-working printer.

[Jan Smit]

Default is set to A4. However, the problem seems to occur only when printing from within hpvue. From the command prompt it prints correct.

[Jan Smit]

Sorry if my original question was not quite clear!

The printer is attached to the NT box as Windows 95/98 users also need to use it. As stated tcp-ip printing on the NT box is enabled and on the HP machines as a remote printer.

What might be needed to say is that when I print from the command line i.e. "lp /etc/hosts" (the printer is the default printer) the paging is OK.
However if I print using the file editor in HP-VUE the print heders come as on a letter size page but page breaks as on A4 paper i.e. two page headers and a bit of the next page on each page printed. Also if I print a graphics page such as from netscape then I get pages and pages of garbage.

Greetings

Jan Smit
jansmi@transnet.co.za

[John Waller]

Hi Jan,

I still believe that this may be a problem with the printer setup on the NT box.
What you could try to check this, is to disable the print queue on the HP system (disable printername) and send a 2 prints. One from the command line and one from HP-VUE. It may be an idea to use the same file , i.e /etc/hosts.

This will place 4 files within the directory /var/spool/lp/request/printername. Their should be two files staring cA and two starting dA. The cA files contain the header information whilst the dA contain the actual print file. Check these files to see if they are basically the same. You should check at any control codes embeded within the files, e.g. ^F , ^L etc. (Form Feed, Line Feed)

If the files are thye same then the problem is definatly with the NT box , if not then I'm not sure where the problem lies.

P.S Don't forget to enable the printer afterwards (enable printername).
Regards