Printing French accents on a TCPware Terminal server printer

[yaron1]

Hi,

After a printer was replaced, French accents are not printed correctly. The printer is accessed through TCPware Terminal Server. What can be the problem?

Thanks for the answers,

Yaron.

[Hakan Zanderau ( Anders]

Yaron,

What kind of queue are you using ??
$ SHOW QUEUE/FULL

What kind of printer was used, and is used ?

Hakan

AKA The PrinterGuru ;-)

[yaron1]

Hi,

SHOW QUEUE/FULL will only show how the queue was initialized, here:
Server queue , idle, on ::",9100",
mounted form DEFAULT
/BASE_PRIORITY=4 /DEFAULT=(FEED,FORM=DEFAULT) /OWNER=[SYSOPS,SYSTEM]
/PROCESSOR=TCPWARE_TSSYM /PROTECTION=(S:E,O:D,G:R,W:W) /RETAIN=ERROR

The new printer is Xerox (I dont have more details its far from me) The print is sent from VMS / VAX V 5.5.
Normally there are line printers or Terminal (LAT port) printers. However, here with the TCPware, it seems to send to an I.P address. And called Terminal Server Printing. Im not sure that my question is only for the TCPWARE, is there anything to be done in order to print special characters like French accents? Is it something with the Symbiont process that process the request? shold a different /FORM be used?

Thanks.

[Hakan Zanderau ( Anders]

Yaron,

OK, you are using a TELNET-symbiont.

The new printer is a LASER, right ?
and the replaced printer was a ?? Brand ? Model ?

also supply a SHOW QUEUE/FORM/FULL 'form' of the form you are using to print files with french accents.......and maybe a piece of a file....

Hakan

I used to work in the VMS Support Team at HP in Sweden and one of my special skills was printproblems in complex environments.

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

Host software on OpenVMS sends ASCII or DEC MCS character codes to the printer, and OpenVMS is mostly or completely oblivious to the type of printer on the far end of the connection.

(The one salient exception here is a mechanism such as the DECprint Supervisor DCPS package, which translates the file contents from text to Postscript.)

Presuming here that there have been no alterations to anything on the host nor on the terminal server (and I'd imagine the connection here is via TCPware to some IP terminal server), then the difference here is in the printer, and you'll need to do your own homework to determine what changed in the printer, and what you have to do in your application.

What you're describing is usually a bog standard character mapping issue that's common with swapping printers and printer models, and usually little or nothing to do with the host. It appears that your old and your new printers map the ASCII or MCS codes for the particular characters. (I'm here presuming you're referring to accented characters and not to the accent characters.)

You will have to figure out how to get the characters remapped or character sets selected, and whether you'll need to remap or alter or load custom fonts or select fonts directly in the application data sent to the printer or via a device control library and the out-of-band selection process for this stuff.

Google will find previous discussions of OpenVMS and printers and printer character sets over the years. Also see topics including the must-read printer manual and topics including:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/92
http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/129
http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/622

[Hakan Zanderau ( Anders]

Yaron,

Hoff said:

> and you'll need to do your own homework to
> determine what changed in the printer, and
> what you have to do in your application.

I will do some of that homework a lot faster, because I know what to look for......if you just supply the information I ask for.

Hakan

Hoff, don't take it the wrong way.

[Hakan Zanderau ( Anders]

If you need more help, don't hesitate to send me a mail.

Hakan

hakan(dot)zanderau(at)ha-solutions(dot)se