Strange printer activity

[Nick D'Angelo]

We have two Unix 10.20 servers that both are experiencing problems printing to a HP4000 PCL 5e and HP5000 PCL 5e.

The printing is all scrunched up, meaning that the top of the 2nd line is printing at the bottom of 1st line and the same all the way down.

I usually used Jetadmin or jetdirect software to set them up.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[Ken Hubnik_2]

Have you tried adjusting your pitch and lpi settings on the printers??

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

The printer or any pointer device work on 2 codes , ie

CR = carriage return
CR= carraige return + line feed

so depending on how it is setup it is taking a craaige retunr w/o a new line feed so you may like to adjst this setting in the printer setup itself.

Manoj Srivastava

[Tom Jackson]

Nick:

Can you print a test page? How do the fonts look?

Also, what are you sending? Try sending a simple ascii file like /etc/hosts.

Tom

[Nick D'Angelo]

The printer works 100% in the Windows world.

I have printed the simple /etc/hosts file and it comes out with the lines very close to it.

Could it be a Postscript versus PCL problem?

Windows can handle this fine, but HPUX does not perhaps?

[John Dvorchak]

I don't know if I can help but when Windows prints it sends form formating information on evry print job. So no matter how the printer(s) are setup they get re-programmed before every print job. HPUX on the other hand will only try to send formating information if it is in the interface file for lp. You should probably look at the printers and see how they are setup as a default. Should be some standard font and line spacing that produces 80 characters per line and about 60 lines per page. Old printers used to be set to 66 lines per page at 6 lines per inch, but laser printers don't print in the first and last half inch of paper so 60 lines per page is about it.

You could edit the interface files on the HPUX boxes inserting your form specs so it reprograms the printers before every print job like Windows does. But for a test I would make sure the the printers default to a sane or common font and 10 characters/inch and 60 lines/page just to isolate the problem.

Good luck

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Easy problem to solve. Unlike Windows printing subsystem where detailed font and spacing information is sent to the printer at the beginning of every job, HP-UX simply sends an ESC-e (reset back to printer defaults) plus any -o option codes (if any were supplied). Most likely, someone messed with the printer's front panel menu and selected font sive and/or spacing to print their specific job, then left the printer in the new default state.

To test this, add the option -ovsi8 to the lp command and you should get a fairly wide line separation which means that someone messed with the printer defaults. Check the owner's manual on the two printers to see how to reset the printer back to factory defaults. Those printers may have a configuration lock which will prevent changing the defaults.

[Nick D'Angelo]

Simply reset the control panel back to the factory defaults and bingo, works like a charm.