Printing Macola Forms to Okidata printer

[user35]

Have an OKIDATA 591 that prints our Order Acknowledgement and Invoice forms in a Progression 400a environment. We upgraded to a new Macola server in addition to upgrading to 400a from 300c. In addition to all this we upgraded a separate server from 2000 server to Windows 2003 Server. This server is our network print server. All these changes were done over a weekend. As a result, our Okidata 591 is having a problems with the Macola forms (cobol). It will not print top 3 or 4 lines of forms correctly. I suspect the problem has more to do with upgrade of Printer Server rather than the Macola server, but still need an answer. Any thoughts? Anyone have a successful driver that works with an OKIDATA 591 and Macola?
Thanks...

 

[NEmacGuy]

First place I would look is what print driver are you using ?

591 would normally be the epson LQ1000

 

[MacolaHelp]

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dot matrix printing. Ick, ick, ick. The further you go down the upgraded OS path, the more problems there are with legacy printers. Is the okidata a network printer? Is it on a different server than the macola server? Is the print driver installed on the SERVER, not the workstation?

Did you initialize the print default file in macola and reselect the printer? Also initialize the report passing file and the deferred report file.

SOMETIMES, it behooves you to recreate the problem form from a generic macola form. See if a vanilla macola standard form prints properly. If it does, they've probably corrected some inherent form design problems that have occurred over time. It really doesn't take that long to build a new form from the vanilla macola forms. Much less time than troubleshooting existing form. Be sure to avoid decreasing the lines per line item from 8 to something else. I've had problems through various software versions of portions of the line items that wouldn't print or would print erratically if the # lines <> 0.

 

[user35]

Yes, it's a network printer, served off of a different server than macola server, print driver installed on server (i believe, will double-check. Initialized report passing file, print default files...

 

[MacolaHelp]

Did you try the epson driver per NEmacguy? Doesn't that 591 also have an emulation switch that you can set to epson or IBM proprinter (if memory serves me correctly)?

All other factors having been checked, you should try the default standard forms, usually 01 and 03. Does it happen to all forms?

I also reread your post and did you really upgrade the actual server itself from 2000 to 2003 that the printers live on? I generally don't do server installations and OS work, but all of the network geeks I work with would put a new server in place with the new OS rather than upgrade a production server's OS. I'm sure you've done the obvious and gotten the latest okidata driver from their website?

 

[mikkopel]

We were using Okidata 591 until recently, with Oki's own
drivers and had no problems with it.

We have Okidata 490N now, and that one works fine too - except for one annoying thing. Every once in a while, when printing checks, there is a blank line in the check stub. It's not an additional line, what happens is the whole line item is not printed. If you then go ahead, and add up all the line items in the check stub, they do not add to the check amount.

This seems like a Macola issue, since it doesn't happen when for example printing orders, but it didn't happen with the previous printer either.