Printer question

[Anthony khan]

Hi Everyone, One of the user trying to print a job from one of the application but it print only on legal paper, he wanna print on Letter size paper. I have check through sam but couldn't find any option to change the paper size,when i try to send a job the printer ask for legal paper, its a laxmark S1855 printer, So is there any way I can change the option or we have to do changes in the application.

Thanks in Advance

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

Most printers have default setting that are set on a configuration panel on the printer itself. It sounds like it is defaulting to legal because of that.

When using "lp" to print, their are printer specific options that can be passed to set specific charateristics. See /usr/spool/lp/interface/
to see what some of the options are.

-- Rod Hills

[Eric Ladner]

There are some standard escape sequences that you should be able to find in the printers documentation that does such a thing. With them, you can do things like change the size of the font, select a different input tray, etc.

Just have the job send those characters first to select the input tray with the right paper size.

[S.K. Chan]

Also look into directory /usr/spool/lp/model for that specific model config file. You can also make changes there.

[Bill Hassell]

The simplest way to handle this is to get a copy of the Lexmark printer's technical reference manual. In there, you should be able to find the escape sequences needed to control paper sources. Unless the Lexmark is emulating an HP printer, there won't be any printer script that can do this for you.

Once you know the sequence, create an lp-wrapper, perhaps called lexletter which takes the file(s) to be printed and pre-pends the needed escape sequence.

The alternative is to copy an existing model script such as PCL5 and rewrite all the sequences to match the Lexmark, then rename it as lexmark or something similar. That way, all of the options will be available from the lp command line. This won't a simple task but with the right documentation, it should be fairly straighforward.

NOTE: If this printer is on the network connected as a remote printer, the command line options (-o) will not be processed. In that case, the lp wrapper for pre-pending text will be required.