topic Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer in Operating System - HP-UX

Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Sean OB_1 — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:00:23 GMT

Ok, I've called support on this and they were no help. So it's on to the forums and the true geniuses within. :-)

I have a Xerox Docutech printer that is run by a solaris box.

I need to print to this from my HPUX servers. I have it setup as a remote printer and can print to it, but it doesn't understand the control codes so everything gets printed in the same font and portrait.

Does anyone know how I can get this to work so that I can also print condensed fonts and landscape?

HPUX 11i
Docutech 6135

TIA,

Sean

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Jeff Schussele — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:12:19 GMT

Hi Sean,

Unfortunately one cannot pass print options to a remote printer. It will be up to the SW creating the print job to embed them within the file OR you could write a script to embed them into the file being passed to the remote printer. But you just can't use -ocondensed or -olandscape to a remote printer - they're discarded.

IF you're using a Jetdirect print server or internally mounted card within the printer AND set ip up as a network prinetr THEN you could pass options to the printer/print server to act upon the job. You can do this on directly attached printers as well.

Rgds,
Jeff

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Sean OB_1 — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:16:01 GMT

Thanks Jeff.

Unfortunately I have to talk to this printer through the Solaris box that runs it.

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Tim Medford — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 18:20:59 GMT

Hi Sean,

I print to a Xerox Docutech from HPUX and have been doing so for a couple years. While it's true you have very little, if any, control over remote printers, the issue can be addressed on the Xerox side.

Our Xerox support person built a number of different print queues on the Docutech to handle different printing needs. One of them even staples documents. I ended up building several different remote printers, one for each special queue.

You may need to pester Xerox for support, but I can assure you that this is all possible. It's just in knowing how to set it up on that side.

Regards,
Tim

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Rene Mendez_4 — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:00:00 GMT

HI

For experiency if you configured the queue in the hpux, need only configure in the host sun the name and ip the server hp.

Regards
RenÃ

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:50:04 GMT

Those Xerox Docutech pritners have a sparc workstation that handles keeping them on the network and spooling the jobs.

At least the model we had and got rid of.

It really was troublesome, but at least it worked with openspool.

We replaced it with a konica.

To get fonts on it, you have to create pcl or postscript templates and get them on the workstation.

Xerox has documentation on their website, I may have paper documentation and disks.

SEP

Re: Printing to a Xerox Docutech as a remote printer

Bill Hassell — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 21:26:49 GMT

Remote printing for SysV spoolers such as HP-UX is a simple text interface. -o options are ignored by non-HP-UX systems. However, the only thing that HP-UX does with these options (-olandscape, -oduplex, -ovsi6.5) is to insert the corresponding PCL codes in front of the data file. To control the printer features, you'll need to insert those code in front of the datafile just like a printer script. The easiest way to do this is to create an lp-wrapper script. In the script, you can capture all the options you want to use, creatye a string of escape codes that tell the printer what to do, then concatenate the control string in front of the data file and send everything to lp.