Excape sequence in separator page?

[magistrate]

Is it possible? I've been told it is possible and it makes sense that it should.

I've downloaded a overlay macro to my HP4100mfp printer:
<esc>%-12345X
<esc>E
<esc>&f23y0X
<esc>&l1T
<esc>&l0S
<esc>&s0C
<esc>&a100h100V
<esc>(8U<esc>(s1p60v0s0b4168T
Macros are fun!
<esc>&f23y10X
<esc>&f1X
<esc>E
<esc>%-12345X

If I do a print command in WordXP (PRINT 27&quot;&f71y4X&quot the macro comes out perfectly, but if I place the sequence (<esc>&f71y4X) in a separator page nothing comes out.

Thank you in advance,

Magistrate

 

[magistrate]

K, maybe I asked the question in the wrong way. Please let me try again.

I have searched the internet, looked at many forums and even read most of the 900 page PCL 5 manual and I still don't understand why when I place <esc>&l1T (which should work says the manual) in my macro and call the macro from a separator page with <esc>&f73y4X (73 is the number of my macro) why it doesn't work.

Please help, it's probably needing someother code in the separator page, but I can't find it.

Thank you for your time and effort, any help will be appreciated.

 

[jlasman]

<esc>&l1T is a job separation command! There is no page.

The command works on printers that have the ability tp physically offset one job from another in the output bin.

If you want a separation page, you have to program it into the PCL job.

Jim Asman
jlasman@telus.net

 

[magistrate]

Forgive my beginnerness....I would like to be able to print an overlay from any application on my computer and not have to worry about placing any excape sequence into every document. So I was thinking that if I send an excape sequence in a separator page that it will print an overlay on every sheet of paper that is printed after it.

Is my thinking wrong? If it is please correct me; If it is not any other suggestions would be great.

Right now all I am sending in my separator page is <esc>&f#y4X. Is there more I should be sending?

Sorry for not asking the right question on my first two posts, this is one of the first times I'm writing to a forum.

Thanks again.

 

[jlasman]

Your thinking is reasonable.

Let's assume that the macro #35 is residend in the printer.

You haven't told us your OS, but ...

In a DOS or UNIX environment, you would need only insert at the beginning of the first page...

<esc>&f35y4X^L

Note the formfeed(CTRL-L) at the end of the command. Understand that an automatic overlay requires the page to eject from the printer in order to run. Anyway, the macro should run on all subsequent pages until the overlay is disabled or replaced by a different one.

Now, if you are running this from WINDOWS, you may have difficulty getting the enable code through to the printer unmolested by the printer driver. Your WORD program has a facility to accomodate this. Other applications may not.

Getting the <esc> to the printer untouched may require some effort. You need to embed the control characters into the user data.

Jim Asman
jlasman@telus.net

 

[UncleRick]

Hi eh,
I just tried this on a win2k machine with the PCL.sep seperation page. There is an UEL after the seperator page and before the data page. Therefore it will not work.

You can see this for yourself by selecting a sep page and printing to file.


Hi Jim,
You mentioned that you work with SCO UNIX. Is there any particular reason? I have tried SCO 5.05 and 7, HPUX 10.10, Solaris(on sparc) 2.6,7,8,9, many Linux distros and all the BSD's. I have found FreeBSD 4.8 to be the most comfortable. Well it wasn't at 4.8 when I started ;-) I have enjoyed your posts and was wondering what brought you to SCO. I assume you are using 7 as 5 is meant as a server.

kind regards,

 

[jlasman]

UncleRick,

Thanks for the post. I didn't realize that the &quot;seperator page&quot; here was a windows driver option and not a direct PCL mechanism. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

It seems that the seperator page is essentially a print job unto itself, so any macro enabling code put in there will go away once the page is printed. I don't see any general solution where an overlay could get invoked in the sep page and persist through to the real print job.

This may be a question better asked in on of the Microsoft forums.

As for UNIX, I started with Tandy Xenix back in the mid eighties and moved on to SCO in 1990. I loaded Linux on one computer, but I found it &quot;klunky&quot; compared to my SCO box. A couple of years ago a friend ask me to type &quot;uptime&quot; on my SCO box. The gives you the number of days since the computer was last booted. It was 780 days at that time! I've never had the reason to want to change, although the issue may be forced at some time.

I have heard some good things about the FreeBSD's around, but what I have works well so I needn't be terribly adventerous at this time.

Jim Asman
jlasman@telus.net