Re: AS/400 and InfoPrint32 printer

Dear Antonio,

Some suggestions would be as follows:

Point 1:

The printer can be configured on your AS/400 as a *LAN 3812 model 1 device
(CRTDEVPRT) using either the *IBMPJLDRV system driver program (TCP/IP
reverse telnet - sockets printing protocol) or the *IBMSNMPDRV (TCP/IP
Simple Network Management Protocol for printers RFC 1759) system driver
program.

It can also be setup as a remote output queue (CRTOUTQ) and the AS/400 will
then use LPR to send the data to the printer. The instructions for creating
these device descriptions can be found on the IBM iSeries and AS/400
technical support web site (http://www.as400service.ibm.com) in the Software
Knowledge Base Under the Print category or in the AS/400 Printing V Redbook
available at (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com).

Point 2:

When you choose a particular input tray in your Windows print driver, the
driver sends a tray request to the printer using a special printer code
value. Normally if you have matched the Windows print driver to the target
printer, you don't need to know the printer code values. When you need to
customize a print driver (as in the case of the HP PCL compatible drivers on
your AS/400 to support your InfoPrint 32 printer), you typically need to
know the printer code values for the target printer. The way the Host Print
Transform feature of OS/400 works is that it maps a request for a source
drawer in your OS/400 printer file to a field in the Manufacturer Type and
Model print driver that you selected in your device description or output
queue configuration. The print driver tray selection fields for laser
printers usually include a default printer code command. These commands can
be edited via the Workstation Customization Object procedure as necessary.
The OS/400 Workstation Customization Object manual explains how to change
the default printer code values in an OS/400 based print driver to create
any type of OS/400 source drawer request to physical input tray on the
printer mapping that you need.

The InfoPrint 32 printer codes are as follows:

Tray 1          Printer Code is also one.
Tray 2          Printer Code is five.
Tray 3          Printer Code is seven.
Tray 4          Printer Code is eight.
Tray 5          Printer Code is nine.
Envelope Tray   Printer Code is six for automatic envelope feeder.

Point 3:

Besides PCL commands, which are used to construct the actual page to be
printed, there are PJL commands (Printer Job Language) which define the
default print environment for a particular job. They are always sent at the
beginning and ending of a spool file. The edge to edge feature is enabled
with one of these commands. The current print drivers on the AS/400 do not
leave you a field that is meant to hold PJL commands so it is very hard to
get the proper sequencing of PJL commands to occur by creating a Workstation
Customization Object. There are some good third party software products in
the marketplace that can help you to manage the inserting of PJL commands
into your non-IPDS data streams should you be interested in pursuing that
capability.

Good luck with your printer installation.

Best Regards,

/Paul
--
Paul Tykodi
Director of Technical Services
LCI-Intermate US, Inc.

p: 603.431.0606 x115
f: 603.436.6432
paul@intermate-us.com
www.intermate.com

>Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 14:23:29 +0200
>From: afvaiv <afvaiv@wanadoo.es>
>Subject: AS/400 and InfoPrint32 printer
>
>Hi, we are having quite a number of problems with an IBM InfoPrint32
>printer. The printer is LAN attached (Ethernet) and will be used for
>different outputs, either from AS/400 and/or Windows.
>
>The InfoPrint32 printer does NOT have the IPDS feature installed.
>The AS/400 is model 820, running V4R5, and updated PTFs.
>The printer came with two manuals: "Quick Config" and "User manual". We
>followed printer Setup instructions at the printer Op's panel. Then,
>went on to configuring it for AS/400.
>
>1- First "surprise": configurations shown in the manual included
>examples for AppleTalk, OS/2, MVS, etc, but for AS/400 the only options
>shown are: as a twinax or ASCII printer, or LAN (Ethernet/T.R.) IPDS
>printer using PSF/400..., and only for the old V3R6, V3R7 versions !!!
>We tried several different configurations, but are getting problems with
>all of them (either fonts too small, or lose rightmost positions when
>printing 198 positions in landscape format after autorotate, etc) Has
>anyone on this list configured it as a LAN printer, without IPDS,
>PSF/400 ? Could you send me the AS/400 printer's device description
>you're using?
>
>2- Second "surprise": Selecting paper trays, for input and for output is
>a nightmare! We are starting to use a program named "QuickPress" (one of
>the many existing which allows for boxes, images, etc, similar to
>PSF/400) which seems to "know" about this problem, since it includes
>something like a "table of equivalences of physical to logical" trays
>translation !!!, whereby when you tell the program to feed from tray 2
>... it means to use tray 5 (an example) and so on... Sounds crazy, but
>they (that program) does include it! The problem is when we print from
>any AS/400 application, and we want to select either input and/or output
>tray... we have to remember to "translate" those numbers in our OVRPRTF
>... Anybody knows a way to avoid this nuissance?

>3- The printer has also been configured for several PC's. The drivers
>installed have a surprising behaviour : with Windows/95/98, you can
>select an option to print "edge to edge", i.e. without any margins
>whatsoever (top/down/right/left). The manual says it is not recommended
>(toner may get the printer durty...) but can be selected. But with
>WindowsNT4.0, this option is not available. Configured the printer (Op's
>panel) for this option as "selected", but the manual says that
>applications printout will override this option... so we can print
>"edge-to-edge" under Windows/95/98, but not from Windows/NT... nor from
>AS/400 , of course! Any ideas? I've read somewhere in Internet that for
>"full" (???) edge-to-edge support, printer needs to be AFP and IPDS...
>Is that true?

>I'd appreciate any help and config samples!  TIA
>- -------------------------
>Antonio Fernandez-Vicenti
>afvaiv@wanadoo.es

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