raw@mcnc.org (Russell Williams) (04/19/89)
Hi! For those of you who have been following the deskjet saga, here is some new information, and some replies to suggestions. The problem with printing out multiple pages is that the first line of the second page is moved down two line, and the first line of the third page is moved down two lines, and so on, and so on. This naturally plays havoc with the paper position. I don't know how to stop this. Another problem is with the left and right margins. Despite setting them to both be 1.0 inch, the left margin is half an inch. To correct this, I have to set it at 1.5. Why? I found the source of my memory questions. In the March 89 issue of The Amiga Sentry, there is a review of Taxbreak by Glenn M. Heck Jr., who states that after calling both HP and Oxxi, he found that "...you must have expanded printer memory in order to print the facsimile." p.42. That's what had me worried. However, it has since printed out large pictures with no problems. I have no idea if there's a memory problem or not. Suggestions that were offered to fix my problem have been many. Thanks a lot to all of you who took the time to write me. Unfortunately, none of them have really helped me. The factory settings are unchanged, I'm using the parallel port, and I'm using 1.3 printer drivers with the 1.3 device. What gets me is that with wordperfect, using the HP Laserjet II definition, it works fine. Perfectly. It's only with the 1.3 that I'm having problems. Any new ideas out there? One side note: I borrowed a friend's Professional Page to try it out. The print out, besides ejecting several blank pages at the end, was horrible!! And it wasn't the printer's fault. The deskjet can do much better print outs than what I got. Is Professional Page just a piece of junk without postscript? I don't want to have to find a postscript printer every time I want to print something out. Thanks, Russell
alh@hprmokg.HP.COM (Al Harrington) (04/21/89)
/ raw@mcnc.org (Russell Williams) / 8:58 pm Apr 18, 1989 / > What gets me is that with wordperfect, using the HP Laserjet II >definition, it works fine. Perfectly. It's only with the 1.3 that I'm having >problems. Any new ideas out there? > Have you tried copying WP's laserjet printer driver and use that? I'm not sure but I think it'll work. > One side note: I borrowed a friend's Professional Page to try it out. >The print out, besides ejecting several blank pages at the end, was horrible!! >And it wasn't the printer's fault. The deskjet can do much better print outs >than what I got. Is Professional Page just a piece of junk without postscript? >I don't want to have to find a postscript printer every time I want to print >something out. Pro. Page looks like shit on anything other than Postscript. I'd suggest getting PageStream. It has a few bugs (some of which have been fixed with version 1.6) but the output looks *outstanding* on any printer! I know Mary Hoffman, Vice President of Safe Harbor Computer Supplies uses and loves her DeskJet. Give her a call at (414) 544-2066. They have an 800 number but I can't remember it. Her husband seems to really know the tech. side of things (and they have good prices and *great* service too!). +-----------------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | -Al Harrington //// | Instant Guru BBS | | ________ //// | (916) 488-9278 | | |__/\__| \\\\ //// | 120 Megs - All Amiga! | | \\\X/// | Over 1000 files online | | alh@hprmo.HP.COM \XXX/ | Baud: 1200/2400 Hours: 24 | | ..{hplabs,hp-sde}!hprmo!alh | PCPursuit: CASAC 1200/2400 | +-----------------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | My comments in no way reflect the views or opinions of Hewlett-Packard | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
allen@hpfcdj.HP.COM (Allen Norskog) (04/28/89)
> The problem with printing out multiple pages is that the first line of >the second page is moved down two line, and the first line of the third page is >moved down two lines, and so on, and so on. This naturally plays havoc with >the paper position. I don't know how to stop this. Well, I had been having some problems, too. So, I decided to finally start tracking things down. What you need to help you out are: Cmd -- Program by Carolyn Scheppner of Commodore. This is available on Fred Fish disks, and was also in the 1.3 release. This program redirects your printer output to a file. You can then use the "type" command with the "opt=h" option to see the control codes that were sent to the printer. Printer User Manual -- You will need this to look up what all the control codes that were sent will do to your printout. You will also probably want to make a couple test files to print out. To test out the lines/page, you will want a file that has a number for each line like: 1 2 3 ... You will want about 130 lines so that you can print out two full pages. You may want a simple straight forward ascii version and another one created with your WYSIWIG (or whatever) editor. If you are testing right and left margins, you will want a file with a line like: 123456789.123456789.123456789.123456789.123456789.12345789. ... Anyway, I had done all this kind of thing with the 1.2 drivers and a LaserJet (found setups for printing in landscape and portrait). The escape sequences there set the top margin to 2 lines. (If you power up or reset the printer, the default is 3 lines.) To get a balanced page with the LaserJet (2 blank lines at the top, and two blank lines at the bottom), you need to set the form length to be 62 lines in preferences. (66 - 2 - 2 = 62). This has worked very well, except if I had to reset the printer. The 2 lines at the top was "hard-coded" into the printer driver as can be seen from the printer driver listing in the RKM. I could not locate this value when "disassembling" the printer driver. Now for the DeskJet. The problem I was having sounds slightly different than yours, but probably similar. I would get one full page, followed by a page with just one line, then a full page, then one line, ... I had been using the defaults that I had always used with the LaserJet -- 62 lines/page. Well, changing it to 61 helped a lot, but there are still some problems. For my tests, I simply copied a ascii file to prt: from the cli. The escape commands for the DeskJet tell it to set 2 blank lines at the top, and the text length to be 61 (the value specified in preferences). You must not specify a text length greater than what will fit on the page, or the command will be ignored. I have margins in preferences as 1 and 80, and the command to the DeskJet become 0 and 79 for margins. So, what did I get? The first page had 3 blank lines at the top, and 60 text lines, and successive pages had 2 blank lines at the top with 61 text lines (line 61 printed on page 2). If you send out the file a second time, you will get 61 lines on the first page. My guess is that when you reset or turn on the printer, the default setting of 3 blank lines at the top is in effect. The page with a single line is a result of trying to print into the perforation skip region. The printer will put anything you try to put here onto a separate page. (You can disable the perforation skip by changing a switch, but then the all the top margin and text length stuff is ignored, and you get worse results than before.) A laser printer can handle resetting the top margin as long as nothing has been printed to the page, but the DeskJet maybe not. One (somewhat ugly) solution is to force a blank page out first by doing something like: echo >prt: One other fun fact -- if you don't change the preference settings, the control sequences will not be resent for subsequent print jobs. (At least if all your print jobs are simply copying files using copy from the cli.) The default 2 blank lines at the top appears to be modifiable if you are adventuresome. It is in a text string this time in the driver. (Do the new RKM's have the DeskJet driver?) With an appropriate binary/hex/disk editor you could change this. What would probably make a good setup is to set it to 3, and set the text length to 60. Then you would match up to the default settings of the DeskJet. I'll also have to check if the 1.3 LaserJet driver works similarly. One other driver hack that I did on 1.2, was to remove the form-feed character that would cause a blank page to be ejected at the end of the print job. These blank pages were a problem for LaserJets, as they tended to jam if you tried to re-use them -- and you quickly ended up with a lot a blank pages. For the DeskJet, at least you can re-use them. Finding the proper form-feed character was somewhat a trial and error process. In summary, if you got print out problems, get familiar with Cmd. Allen Norskog allen_n@hpfcla.hp.com