Supported Printer for HP UX

[Ong Chin Huat]

I looking for a color printer that connect using parallel port that can be supported on my HP-UX AF1 A.09.05A 9000/715 2009258301.
It must be connect using LPT, is a color printer ( ink/laser ). Can any1 pls advise me.

[Ralf Seefeldt]

Hello,

your AF1 is able to support several Printerlanguage. i do not know, which, but I expect,that you may use Printers, which support
- HPGL2 (as it is from HP itself)

you may start SAM and go to Printers and Plotters. There you select Action | Add parallel Printer and further: Printer Model/Interface (This is from HP-UX 10, but it should look the same with UX 9)

There, you will see a list of the supporte printers.

Any printer today should have several compatibilitymodes for older printers. I think, you should easily figure out, which printer will fit.

Please be aware, that not every implementation of a printerlanguage may be 100% compatibel in any remote feature. But you should allways be able to adapt the interfacescropt, if necessary.

I hope this helps.
Regards
Ralf

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Supported:
It is difficult to see if your challenges is to find a way to connect a printer - using LPT1
Or if you are searching for a printer which is easy to setup (drivers etc.) on your HP-UX.

My answer is about connecting the printer.

----

Connection could normally be made easier if you use an HP JetDirect EX adapter.

This is a small box with an Ethernet adapter in one end, and one(or more) parallel ports on the other...

The box thus gives you a network connected printer.

I use this for special printers like "advanced form matrix printers" aso.

The printer will then be setup in the same way as any "HP Laser printer with internal network card"

NB! If you use a EX adapter with several ports, it could be that you would like to know the IP-port numbers:
9100 - LPT1
9101 - LPT2
9102 - LPT3

/Tor-Arne

[Bill Hassell]

You can connect any color printer that accepts ASCII characters foer printing. There are two very different ways that modern printers use for printing: ASCII characters and binary bits for every dot on the page. The binary bit method is often called a "Windows" printer because it cannot be used on any computer except Windows, and then only if there is a special formatter-driver.

HP-UX does not have printer drivers. It has simple scripts that have a few options for ASCII printing. Now ASCII printers have two major languages: ASCII and Postscript. For an ASCII printer, there are some enhancement languages: PCL, Epson as an example. The printer will print plain ASCII characters but with special escape sequences, characters can be changed (bold, different point size, different fonts, etc). PCL is the most widely used printing language in the world and all HP printers (except Windows-only printers) use PCL. Postscript is a very different language in that it is ASCII but a bunch of special formatting instructions must also be sent to the printer too.

Now a color printer and a B&W printer look no different to HP-UX. They are just ordinary printers. HP-UX has nothing built-in to support graphics or color or pictures. You must have an application that knows how to talk to that specific model of printer to format to text or images. Since you have a workstation that has graphics on the screen, you'll need to look at specialized software to take screens captures in color and translate the captures to match the printer. Because you are running an extremely old version of HP-UX, findng software to do this may be very difficult. The Portable BitMap utilities can help (PBM or PBMplus) but finding a 9.05 version may be impossible. Start with http://www.acme.com/software/pbmplus/