66 lines per page on Tektronix Phaser 840 printer?

[Rudy Williams]

Hello--

I have a Tektronix Phaser 840 laser printer that has its own built-in network card and runs a BSD type print server. I am printing to it from an HP-UX 11.11 box. By default, the printer will put 60 lines per page.

I would like to create a print queue that will enable me to print 66 lines per page. So far I am unable to find any references in the interface file to enable 66 lines per page (as I have on other model scripts). It appears that HP-UX is using rlp to send off the job to the printer which makes sense.

Does anyone know of an option to rlp or a mod to the interface file I can make for this?

cjw

[Bill Hassell]

This isn't an HP-UX setting, it is a special escape sequence or Postscript command, depending on what language the printer is using. The printer (like most dot printers) simply looks at the bottom margin and when the next line exceeds the bottom margin, a page eject occurs. The reason it doesn't count lines is that unlike an old fashioned drum or chain printer, there are thousands of fonts and font sizes so 60 lpi is meaningful only when defining the exact font.

You'll need the technical reference manual for the printer's language, then check out how to specify the font's point size and the font's vertical line increment (spacing between lines). This set of characters must be inserted prior to the print job.

One of the limitations of SysV Unix is that the rlp protocol requires all formatting to be accomplished prior to sending the job to the remote server. Therefore, there is nothing in the rlp script to perform any formatting. HP-UX can provide many options for HP printers connected via HP JetDirect cards using the scripts in /opt/hpnpl/sh. You'll have to wrapper the lp command to prepend the needed sequences, perhaps creating a new command called lp66.