aix 6 printing euro symbol on laserjets 1

[fredericofonseca]

Hi all,


Been trying to get our printers to print the Euro symbol and been unlucky so far from doing it unless I manually change my files to include PCL codes.
Any help I can get from here would be great.


All our files are plain text without any PCL or control characters. the only character that could be considered special is the Euro symbol which is using ISO8859-15 code - e.g. on the file it has hexa value of E4

Based on the above I am trying to print a 2 line file, with the euro symbol (E4) and an amount following it
e.g.
€5000
€25000


Our AIX printer is using the AIX printing system (we can not use the System V printing system).
Printer setup as follows.
Interface - JetDirect
Printer type - Laserjet 4000
TYPESTYLE and PITCH courier 10
Print file type - a (have tried with p and c)
code page of print file - ISO8859-15

Every other printer option set to their default.

From what I can see, I need a way to send the file to the printer without any character set conversion, and at the same time I need the printer spooler to send a PCL sequence to the printer to set the printer on ROMAN9 (iso 8859-15) char set as this is the one that contains the Euro symbol on position E4.
If I manually add that sequence "esc(9N" to the print file, and if I send it to the printer in passthrough mode it prints the euro symbol correctly.

However if I try to send it to the printer using either print file type a (ascii) or c (PCL) the printer spooler is converting the E4 character to another one, and it is not sending the pcl sequence to set the printer to ROMAN9.

qprt commands tried so far. None worked.
qprt -P queue -d c -XISO8859-15 file
qprt -P queue -d c file
qprt -P queue -d a -XISO8859-15 file
qprt -P queue -d a file
qprt -P queue -d p -XISO8859-15 file
qprt -P queue -d p file

If I add the esc(9N to the file and if I use the following print command it works, but this is not a acceptable solution
qprt -P queue -d p file


Hope the above is enough. Will answer and give any other details required to help solve this.


Regards

Frederico Fonseca


Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[fredericofonseca]

Solution found - posted here for reference and to help others that may look for this.

In order for a proper charset conversion and correct code page selection to be done automatically by the AIX print spooler the following is required to be defined on the colon file (or command line for qprt)

_X - code page of input file in this case "ISO8859-15"
_c1-9 - aggregate command string - contains PCL sequence to change to correct charset. in this case esc(9N -
_t0-9 - translation file stage 2 - points to available translation tables stage 2

From what I could see on AIX 6 the predefined filters for HP laserjet printers DO NOT contain the t0-t9 filters. In order to solve the issue I had, I had to manually add
/usr/lib/lpd/pio/trans2/iso.8859-15
to one of the t0-t9 entries on the print colon definition.
At the end my file looked like

:327:t1::/usr/lib/lpd/pio/trans2/iso.8859-15
:795:_X:S[D030]I[1810507]EtL[/usr/bin/ls -1 /usr/lib/lpd/piotrans1 | /usr/bin/sed '/^850$/d']V[%`WX]:ISO8859-15 
:135:C4::\33(9N
:658:_d:S[C925]I[1810509]EnL[%IW2]F1:a

where
_X is the default line + the charset defined on the printer, ISO8859-15 in this case
_d is the input file type - defined as ascii in this case
C4 is the default for laserjet-4000 type
and t1 is the line I had to modify.

printer input type must be defined as "a" - extended ascii for the codepage conversion to happen.


Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[DukeSSD]

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