remote printer not printing first column

[MICHAEL_30]

Created a Remote Printer in SAM (HPUX 11.0). The printer is an Okidata 320 connected to a Win2000 PC LPT1 local parallel using Generic/Text driver. The problem is that the first column character on each line does not print. For example: if I print a text file with "This is a test" in several lines, the letter "T" doesn't print. Someone have any idea what's causing this?? Thank you!!

[Frank Slootweg]

No real clue, but very wild guess:

If the old cells still work somewhat, it looks like the printer is using 'FORTRAN page control'. There used to be an HP-UX command/filter for this, but I can not remember the name.

Just to see if it is indeed this, print some text with space, 1, 2 and + as the first character and see if that does anything special (like double-space, page-eject). If so, report which character does what.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

try printing with

lp -oraw ....

Regards

[Bill Hassell]

Indeed, the Win2K configuration is causing the problem. FORTRAN (and COBOL and ALGOL, etc) languages used to print using column 1 for carriage control. This character could specify no line feed, 2 line feeds (for double spacing), even formfeed to eject the current page. If there is no Okidata 320 driver, I would pick a similar Okidata model. Use DOS commands to print to this printer from Win2K to see if the problem exists locally.

Otherwise, you may have to live with the issue of mixing radically differing software solutions with old hardware and create a lp script wrapper that inserts a space in front of each line in the print job before shipping it to the Win2K system.

[Frank Slootweg]

Bill wrote:

> carriage control

Ahhhhh! "carriage control". *That* was what I was looking for:

> $ man -k carriage
> asa(1) - interpret ASA carriage control characters
> $

Thanks Bill!

[Please no (0 or N/A) points for this response.]

[MICHAEL_30]

Thank you Andreas, Bill and Frank for the replies. I got it. I edited the printer name in /etc/lp/interface with
pr -w80 -l24 -t $6 | lp -d$printer -o raw