Printing landscape to a label printer

[Jennifer Werner]

Is anyone out there printing from OPENVMS to a label printer that needs to print "landscape" (SIDEWAYS).
Each line needs to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise for proper printing on each label.
I am using a DYMO SE300.

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

Printing landscape is generally accomplished via DECprint Services (DCPS) for Postscript devices, and via a landscape module and SYSDEVCTL.TLB for other devices. What gets inserted into the landscape module and into the SYSDEVCTL device control text library is based on whatever sequence is needed by the target device.

For the Dymo LabelWriter SE300, here.

According to the manual, the SE300 powers up in portrait, and switches to landscape upon reception of its set print orientation command (GS V) sequence.

This looks to be a (hex byte) 1D (hex byte) 56 (ASCII bytes) Vn, where n is a value from a table. 1, 2, 4 and 6 are various landscape modes and speeds. See below.

The SE300 manual has a commendably complete list of descriptions and sequences and code examples; this manual is pretty good.

Here's the basics for using the device control library:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_5271.html

What you put in your module will be specific to the SE300 printer.

To get the "funky" ASCII key values sequences inserted into the text module you're creating here, you can often use ^V in TPU or EVE, or the SPECINS (Gold-KP3, IIRC) stuff in EDT.

As a quick test, here's some DCL that creates a file containing the sequence, and a Hello World message. Create the file, then print it to the SE300. The following is a rough DCL translation of part of an example from the SE300 manual:

$ close/nolog foo
$ open/write foo x.tmp
$ esc[0,8] = 27
$ gs[0,8] = 29
$ lf[0,8] = 10
$ vt[0,8] = 11
$ ff[0,8] = 12
$ write foo esc "*" + gs + "t" + vt + gs + "V1" + "Hello" + lf + "World" + ff
$ close/nolog foo

I've stuffed it all on one line because of the CR/LF handling inherent in DCL printing.

You might have to reset the printer after this DCL-created file; there's probably a sequence you'll want to add into the device reset module position for this printer.

Using the device control library means you can use more standard means for creating the file, and need not embed these characters in the data stream.

And as for serial printing, you sometimes have to set the terminal line for serial line pasthru, too. SET TERMINAL/PASTHRU. But that may not be necessary here, as this device looks to be ASCII and ANSI-compliant.

I've posted an example of using DCL with escape sequences at my web site a while back, starting here:

http://64.223.189.234/node/150

If you'd like help with this off-line and don't want to wade through all of what I've posted here -- and I'm guessing at some stuff here, as I don't have an SE300 to test with -- you can contact me or various other folks that are regulars here off-line. (This topic would certainly be fodder for a more detailed posting over at the web site, too.)

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

[Jennifer Werner]

Thank You So much for your time Mr. Hoffman! I printed the DYMO users manual and see all the codes now.