PCL Programming - How to Rotate Text?

[cvandijk]

I am working on a COBOL program right now that creates duplicate tax bills. The form that the duplicate bill is created on is on a legal size piece of paper divided up into two parts. If you hold the paper in the portrait direction, you have about 3 inches worth of paper that needs data output on before you have to rotate the text 270 degrees using the printer language to have it print on the other part of paper.

The problem that I am currently having is that after I print the first 3 inches of text and then have to rotate the text to accomodate the other parts of bill, the page ejects and starts printing on a new piece of paper. The page ejects right after I perform the escape sequence for text orientation.

In reading all of the PCL language manuals it says that this is not supposed to happen but I can't seem to figure out how to circumvent this. If anyone has any insight into how to possibly fix this that would be great. I am running RMCobol on a UnixWare 7 platform. I know that UnixWare has had it share of issues on the printing realm so I am sure that this is probably one of my problems.

Thanks,

Chris

 

[jlasman]

My guess is that somewhere, somehow through the rotation a linefeed is created that puts the cursor over the bottom margin and that causes the formfeed. I assume you are using the sequence <esc>&a###P for the rotation.

Or perhaps there is a command in there that will cause a formfeed if there is printable data.

If you want to print the PCL to a file rather than to the printer, email it to me and I will have a look.

jlasman at telus dot net


Jim Asman

http://www.spectracolorservices.com

 

[jlasman]

If this is being fed to an 'lp' command, then first try adding "-o raw" to the lp command line and see if that changes anything.

Jim Asman

http://www.spectracolorservices.com