Re: Simple Printing Question

Hi Konrad,

In general most HP LaserJet printers have an unprintable margin along all four sides of cut sheet forms. It is usually a value between 0.10 and 0.20 inches on most reasonably new HP LaserJet printers when printing with PCL. The manufacturer type and model choices for HP LaserJet printers will have an unprintable margin value included in the Workstation Customization Object. It is definitely possible to make your own WSCST and zero out the unprintable margin values so that any truncation will be the result of the printer executing the function and not host print transform.

If you are printing on Letter sized paper at 10 characters per inch, position 84 is too close to the edge of the paper to be printed. In order to print the minus characters, you would most likely need to perform two specific steps in creating a customized WSCST.

1. Zero out the unprintable margin values to create an edge to edge supporting WSCST.

2. Add a new font entry in the WSCST you are creating, which maintains the height and typeface of the current 10 CPI font being selected but is actually spaced at 11 CPI.

You would then direct your application to call for the new font definition you added (by FGID) as necessary.

Because your are using *AFPDS, the WSCST font definition process is a little more involved. If you were printing *SCS, you could just change the HMI setting and your problem would be resolved. With *AFPDS there is a lot of individual character positioning included in the resulting PCL so I believe you need to add a comprehensive table describing the character metrics of the new 11 CPI font you are defining within the WSCST you are building.

Feel free to contact me off list if you have further questions about creating WSCST's to meet your application requirements.

Best Regards,

/Paul
--Paul Tykodi
Principal Consultant
TCS - Tykodi Consulting Services LLC

Tel/Fax: 603-343-1820
Mobile: 603-866-0712
E-mail: ptykodi@xxxxxxxxx
WWW: http://www.tykodi.com

date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:44:23 -0500
from: "news.midrange.com"
subject: Simple Printing Question

Somewhere lost in the layers of host print transform and its interaction
with our iSeries is some strange behavior.

We have a print file defined in dds as 85 wide type *AFPDS that has two  -
(minus) characters on two separate lines in column 84.

When printed to a variety of printers mostly laser jet emulations it prints
fine except for dropping the -.  With and overlay or without an overlay it
looks the same.

I have changed the width from 80 to 100 both on the printer file and in an
override and it looks altered on the iSeries but prints exactly the same on
the printer. Somehow has HPT seen the lack of data and dropped the - from
the last position? What is real strange is truncating the line through a
printer override still prints the report with the data but minus the minus.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Konrad