JetDirect

[j773303]

Does JetDirect support non HP printer? Such as Cannon or Konica printer can be a network printer on HP-UX?

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

I need a bit more info. What kind of jetdiect card/box/server and what kind of cannon/konica printer ?

Most printers can be setup as a hp printer.

Robert-Jan.

[John Meissner]

Yes jet direct does...

Just last week we had to install a Cannon (not sure what type to be honest... I'm in the United states and the printer was in Mexico. Anyway You will still choose an HP printer under what type you are installing. You'll just pick the closest match. I'll look into the specific models we were dealing with and post back.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

JetDirect is an HP-proprietary design for network cards connected to printers. Other manufacturers have elected to design their own cards and use the RFC 1179 standard for remote printing, while HP's JetDirect software talks bidirectionally to the JetDirect cards using port 9100 (and 9101, 9102 for multiport LAN cards).

The answer is that HP-UX will handle non-HP network cards as "remote printers" and NOT "network printers" (SAM's nomenclature). The difference is that remote printers look like printers connected to a Unix or Windows lpd-style server, while network printers must be HP JetDirect LAN cards. To confuse things just a bit, HP makes network print servers (the JetDirect EX or external box) that has a LAN connector and one (or more) parallel ports for any printer. In that case, the printer will be a network printer and the JetDirect software will talk to the printer using JetDirect protocol.

So for all network printers, the printer scripts are executed locally and all -o options (like -olandscape or -oduplex) work just fine. But as with all remote printers, the SysV lp spooler expects the remote sserver to process the job and handle -o options. These options are silently ignored by remote servers that are not HP-UX systems (ie, Windows, Linux, other Unix flavors as well as network cards from other manufacturers). This means that print jobs will need (as a minimum) a filter to match the printer but the filter must occur prior to the lp command. The minimum filter will be ux2dos as in:

ux2dos some_file | lp -dxxxx

so that the EndOfLine character (LF) is translated into CR/LF needed by the vast majority of printers. Otherwise, the output will stairstep off the edge of the paper (text LF text LF text LF...). Most HP printers and a few non-HP printers hhave the ability to map LF into CR/LF with an escape code but generally this code must be sent before each job.

Other issues with non-HP printers: if the printer only has Postscript, there are no tools to convert plain ASCII files into usable Postscript code. You can start with the model script /usr/lib/lp/model/postscript which does perform ASCII-to-Postscript translation and take out the relevant sections. For -o options like landscape or duplex, etc, you'll have to create a custom frontend filter to handle these features.