printing - adding form feed

[Karen Bennett]

I have installed a dot-matrix printer on a JetDirect EX. How can I send a form feed after each report so that the users can more easily tear off their report?

[Michael Francisco]

If this is a "standard" printer, a CTRL-L or an ascii code 12 appended to each report will instruct the printer to send a form feed.

[Madanagopalan S]

you can add the following command in /etc/lp/interface/printer_name


echo "^L" >> /tmp/$printer.$$
mv /tmp/$printer.$$ $1

This commands should be added before the rlp occurs.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

if you have setup the printer queue with jetadmin then there is a script at /etc/lp/interface/model.orig/
Edit this file and look for a line that contains:
cat $file 2> ....

Insert after this line:
echo "\014\c"

Regards

[Steve Post]

what's control-L? What's 014? Control-L is the key sequence to run a form feed. This is ascii value 12 in decimal, C in hex, and 14 in octal. The character tells a printer to spit out a page.

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Yes, both of them do the same thing ie it gives the printer the FF signal so that the page skips to the TOP OF FORM . So in case you want an empty page after the print out you will have to give the command twice , since one will take you to the top of the next page , and then the second command will take to the next page.

You can test the command by dumping these escape characters on the parallel port device to see the results.

[Roberto De Gioia]

On Unix system, when you create a printer, one file is created under "/usr/spool/lp/interface/".
This file can be used to add every printout a form feed using the command echo "014c"; the same command can be sent directly from your own application for each report.
Hoping to solve your problem....