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Re: Printing on OpenVMS

 
jinhock
Visitor

Printing on OpenVMS

Hi All,

 

I'm new and I have no experience in OpenVMS. I would like to know how can I configure our current Kyocera printer to Brother printer?

 

Current scenario:-

 

1.Printing using Brother Printer - the print out suppose to be the as the jpeg file but it came out as the pdf file (file is just example)

2.The system is using the below command to print

$   PRINT/NOFLAG/NOFEED/FORM=Printer/QUE=PRINT$KLPR01 COMETS$SYSTEM:V01KLP_PAK.MCRO,sys$login:klpr_27E05A84.tmp   

 

Appreciate the help.

 

Thank you.

Goh

4 REPLIES 4
Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: Printing on OpenVMS

Third-party printers are a long-standing pain with OpenVMS and tend to have nowhere near the level of testing and integration that folks using printers with Microsoft Windows might expect, and the effort here can range from minor queue or printer settings changes to dealing with much more intractable limitations of OpenVMS or of the queues or of the applications.

 

Details here do vary by printer model, printer settings and even sometimes the particular printer firmware.

 

If you want to pursue this here in the forums, you're going to need to identify specifically what printers are involved, and whether that printer has support for PDF-format printing тАФ by default, OpenVMS does not, so there was something else generating the PDF, and something else either in the printer or in some outboard software that was processing and rendering the PDF.  Also whether other formats such as plain ASCII text files print correctly, as might be expected.

 

Given you're apparently getting the job to the printer based on those error messages, the queues and OpenVMS do appear to be more-or-less working.  Which implies that there might be something mis-configured or that's not supported by whichever Brother printer is involved, or тАФ maybe тАФ there's an errant queue setting somewhere.   But given the general lack of PDF support on OpenVMS, I'd bet on something (not) configured within or not available the particular Brother printer.   As a starting point, compare the Brother printer model's specifications with those of the Kyocera it replaced, particularly around support for PDF.  Determine whether there's support in one or both for native PDF support and/or automatic print format detection, for instance.

 

Information on managing queues on OpenVMS is available in the OpenVMS documentation set in the System Manager's Manuals, and you might need to refer to the TCP/IP Services printing documentation and/or third-party IP stack and/or the DECprint Supervisor (DCPS) package if you're using any of those.  But again, this is likely something with what the printer supports, and/or how the printer can be configured тАФ this given you're getting data to the printer, and given the lack of PDF support in OpenVMS and its printing paths.

 

Or if you're in a hurry тАФ and also given you're working with semiconductor wafers and fabrication and that's usually not something that a small organization deals with тАФ call somebody from elsewhere within the corporate  IT organization that has more experience here (maybe check with your manager?), and/or escalate this to an outside vendor that can or does provide integration support for your organization, and that can research and resolve this for you.

 

jinhock
Visitor

Re: Printing on OpenVMS

Dear Hoff,

 

Thank you for your explanation, actually I forgot to mentioned that the printing is using Kyocera prescribe emulation and is configured using telnetsym.

 

I would like to print out the data without changing any program/coding, is there a way to like print the file to pdf and print it out in another printer (Brother, Hp, Canon) ?

 

Appreciate your help.

Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: Printing on OpenVMS

That you do not want to modify any application code тАФ nobody ever does, of course тАФ and that you seek to use telnet over lpd or raw format printing тАФ most will folks pick whichever of the three works for the particular configuration тАФ is certainly useful information, but these details unfortunately do not address the core question you are asking.

 

If you want to pursue this discussion here, you are going to have to determine the particular printers involved and obtain the exact model numbers, and post those details here.   We also need to know exactly which existing printer vendor and model was in use, and is being replaced.

 

With the printer vendor and model data, somebody might then research the particular printers and might post up a response for you here.  Without specific data, it is absolutely impossible to answer the questions you are asking.

 

Why do I ask for these details?   Brother, Kyocera and HP each have a gazillion different printers, after all.  Some work with OpenVMS.  Some do not.  Some can print Postscript or PDF.  Some not.

 

If you want to find a printer тАФ I'm increasingly not sure what you're asking in this thread тАФ then you're going to have to look at your current printer use тАФ probably using Postscript or potentially PDF, given you're apparently printing images on the existing printer тАФ and then determine which printers support compatible firmware, and that might also work with OpenVMS.

 

Here is an intro to IP printing on OpenVMS.

 

Edit: If you want to transfer files around for printing, OpenVMS has what's known as the EXECSYMB symbiont on the OpenVMS Freeware, and that allows you to issue DCL commands in response to files arriving via the queues.  That might be useful as part of transfering a file to a remote printer.   Whether that will work with what you are doing, I do not know.

MarkOfAus
Valued Contributor

Re: Printing on OpenVMS

(For some reason I can't see your attachments - it's probably my old Firefox version, so apologies if this is somewhat irrelevant)

 

You are probably in for a lot of work. Not many people I know like printers and interfacing to them - unless someone else does the work.

 

The problem is you have a device library attached to that queue which is using the form called printer. Inside that printer file is commands to make your old printer print the way it should.

 

The trouble is your new printer doesn't understand those commands.

 

Perhaps you could post the result of: 

show queue/full PRINT$KLPR01

 

The queue will have a device library attached to it, which is located in sys$library (or SYS$SYSROOT:[SYSLIB]).

 

This library is just a bunch of text files (1 or more), which can be extracted, modified and deleted.

 

However, all this tells you is what the current printer does with the data fed to it from VMS.

 

To solve your problem, you need to find the codes the current printer uses, what they do and convert those codes to the new printer. Then you need to build a library and make that library the one used by the queue PRINT$KLPR01

 

I should add, you do have an alternative:

 

Should you have a unix box in your organisation, you could create an lpd print queue on VMS which forwards a raw file to that unix machine. On the unix machine you could create a queue which receives the print jobs from VMS with a filter attached to it (piping it into ghostcript or even python, for example), producing a pdf file or writing a filter to format it yourself.

 

 

I am not sure of your level of knowledge of Unix/Linux though.

 

Cheers,

Mark.