Library for Printronix P7205 on VAX OpenVMS V7.3

[Dante Villarreal]

A customer has replaced a Printronix Proline Series 5 printer, with a new P7205 Printronix printer, on a VAX running OpenVMS 7.3. Some bar code reports are not printing well, with the barcode printing in the same area with the data. So far I have not find any new library for the print queue, and I have no idea if a printer setting should be changed, and work with the same library, or if this would require an application change. Some reports print fine on both printers, but others not. Any feedback would be appreciated. I do provide support to the OS, and I am not a programmer. Thank you.

[John Gillings]

Dante,

The minutae of specific printer software is a fairly specialised area of knowledge and expertise. I'd recommend taking this question back to the people who sold you the printer. They should have access to support information (indeed, I would have expected a post installation verification to ensure the customer was satisfied with all report types they print!).

[RBrown_1 · Accepted solution]

I think the first thing you need to do is check the specs of the old and new printers and find out if they are supposed to be compatible. Perhaps there is a character sequence for the new printer that will make it act like the old printer. Once found you could insert that character sequence into the initialization module of the device control library.

Type

$ SHOW QUEUE/FULL

for the queue which serves the printer, and note what it says for /LIBRARY. That is the device control library used for the printer.

Find out what creates that library and what is in it. If you can't find any source then you can use LIBRARY commands to get a directory of the library and extract its contents for closer examination.

Also note what SHOW QUEUE tells you for /SEPARATE.

You may need to capture the data stream to the printer so that you can analyze it and figure out why the printer is doing what it does instead of what you want it to do.

If you are lucky you will be able to fix this by updating modules in the device control library. If you are not lucky, ....

[Phil.Howell]

I don't know if this model supports it, but some printronix printers allow you to set the "compatibility mode" so that they behave the same as previous models.
Phil

[Dante Villarreal]

Thanks to all of you for your feedback. Regards.