Printing question/issue

[Robert Herron]

System: HP rp4440 with HP-UX 11.11 and JetDirect Printer Installer for Unix (HPNPL) E.10.34

Printers: HP LaserJet 9000DN (with duplexer) and HP LaserJet 4000TN

Problem: cannot set margins when printing to LJ9000.

For disaster recovery purposes, I'm creating one notebook per server I support (actually two copies - one onsite and one offsite). The notebooks will have home grown system documentation, system generated info (ie print_manifest and SysInfo 1.5 by Scott Truesdale), etc. The SysInfo output is 25 pages and print_manifest is 12 pages (assuming 60 lines per page).

To save trees and to be more managable, I want to print the documents in duplex with compressed font, left margin at 10, and right margin at 124. The margins are needed to allow for the notebook binder holes. The commands I use are:

print_manifest | lp -d lj9000 -oduplex -oc -olm10 -orm124

print_manifest | lp -d lj4000 -oc -olm10 -orm124

The LJ4000 prints correctly. The LJ9000 seems to ignore the lm and rm settings. The margins appear to go back to defaults (2). Its banner page and /var/opt/lp/log shows the margin options.

I used the -odebugm option and looked at the resulting files. The LJ9000 file does not have the ^[&l10L and ^[&l124M to set the margins while the LJ4000 does.

I'm using the lastest net_lj9000 modelscript and updated the printer's firmware.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?

[Bill Hassell]

Use the same script for both printers. There is a web site to get the latest printrer scripts:

http://www.hp.com/pond/modelscripts/index2.html

However, the two printers are virtually the same for page layout and font controls, so just copy the LJ4000 script on top of the LJ9000 script. cd to the interface directory which is: /etc/lp/interface/model.orig

Now in that directory will be copies of the original models but renamed the same as the printer queues. Assuming the two print queues are lj4 and lj9:

cp lj4 lj9

Now try the format controls. You will also find two very useful commands for all HP printers: -ovsi#.## and -ohsi#.## These two options control the spacing between characters (hsi) and between lines (vsi). The value is quite precise and allows you to squeeze a fixed spacing font like Courier to as much as 100 to 120 characters per line in portrait mode. Similarly, you can squeeze the lines to more than 90 or more lines per page. Try -ovsi5.2 -ohsi4.3 and then adjust to control spacing.

[Robert Herron]

Bill,

The margins worked properly by using the LJ4's model script (net_ljx0000). Thanks for the suggestion.

I tried LJ9050 model script and the margins don't work. If I wanted to report a bug, would I just open a regular support ticket thru ITRC? While the net_ljx0000 script works and covers the majority of printer features, there must be some reason to have a separate model script.

--Robert

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You can certainly report this as a bug to the Response Center. You should reduce the problem to the simplest case possible so that it is very easy to reproduce. Of course, a real UNIX guy would debug the interface file and see why the margin commands are not being transmitted. It may be something as simple as a bad case statement or bad argument parsing. You then report your fix to the Response Center.

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

if I remember correctly, there was a set of options which got applied only in PCL mode and not in PostScript mode (and vice versa).

Look carefully at 'man netlj9000' (or whatever the name of the man page should be) for such restrictions!

mfG Peter

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The net_ljx000 is indeed the best script to use. I have no idea why the printer division (well, the division that owns hppi code these days) created that large (but very incomplete) set of printer scripts. The reason is that the options in these scripts are bascially the same because they all use PCL and PJL. The escape codes are forward compatible and there is very little difference between each printer when it comes to plain ASCII page layout options. I don't have a good recommendation since the scripts are too large to compare. So with each new HP printer, test the printer's ability to perform common tasks and if something doesn't work, replace the script with the net_ljx000 script.

[Robert Herron]

Thanks everyone. I think I have everything under control now.

[Robert Herron]

Closing thread. Workable solution found.