Printable area on laserjet 5si 1

[Imdougal]

My company has pre-printed stationary which requires printing to start between 1/8" and 1/4" from the left edge, but we have not been able to set the left margin to less than 1/4".

Is there any way using PCL to send a text file from UNIX to the printer to use a margin of less than 1/4"

Richard

 

[jlasman]

You can cheat the 1/4" margin slightly by using the
sheet offset command. This will create a > 1/4" margin
on the right. It effectively moves the entire printable
window. Anyway, try this...

<esc>&l-45U

Put the command at the top of the PCL file. That should
make your left margin about 1/5 &quot;. Negative values move
the window to the left and positive values move it to
the right. If the value is too great, then the text will
be clipped.

BTW that is an ell after the ampersand.

Jim Asman
jim@spctra.wimsey.com

 

[Imdougal]

Thanks, that works perfect with a value of -65.

After a few print tests, it took a while to notice that the right margin is being clipped.

The pitch is set to 12 and prints 96 chars on a line, unfortunately I need to print 97. The right margin escape sequence and all documentation I can find has not yet provided me with a solution.

Can you help with this?

 

[jlasman]

Is the whole point of the margins to squeeze
97 characters onto the line?

If so, get rid of the sheet offset command altogether
and just after the 12 pitch command, insert a horizontal
motion index command in the form ...

<esc>&k9.8969H

This will crowd the characters together just enough
to allow 97 characters across the page.

Any kind of a font change will RESET the HMI, so to
maintain the tighter spacing you will have to re-issue
the HMI sequence. This means that a change to bold,
a change to italic, and back to normal font attributes
will require the HMI command to be sent again.

So if you need to bold some text, assuming the HMI has
already been set, you would need the following...

normal text-bold on-HMI-bold text-bold off-HMI-normal text

Let me know how it works out.

Jim Asman
jim@spctra.wimsey.com

 

[Imdougal]

The character and pitch I'm using on a particular pre-printed form works great.

The form has a narrow left margin and a narrow right margin, and I just need to print one more char without squeezing the characters closer together.

The characters I'm trying to print are money values e.g. $300.00. On the form I'm printing $300 00 where the form uses a red dotted vertical bar in the space for the decimal point. The first decimal place happens to be the 96th character, the second gets clipped. It has to be printed in this position.

Can I do it?

 

[jlasman]

Why don't you email a copy of your text output that gets
clipped, and I will have a look. You might be able to
do a sheet offset, but this will depend on the data
structure and the flexibility of your application.

Jim Asman
jim@spctra.wimsey.com