Network Printing

I converted all of our Lexmark 1855's to tcp/ip a couple of months ago. Before
they were all connected Twinax. I had the same problem. Whenever the print was
more than about 80 (maybe 60/40/?) characters long it would force landscape and
adjust for 120 charaters. So even though a document was only 81 charaters, it
would adjust to the size font a 120 character wide document would need. This
font was really small.

Does your print-out span across the whole page in landscape? If not, this is
what it is doing.

What fixed this is I converted all the printers to be IPDS printers. In order
to do this I had to order a SIMM to install in each printer for the IPDS
option. I am not sure if the 1250 & 1255 have this option, but look on the
Lexmark web site. I ended up buying the SIMM's used. I'm not sure if they make
them new anymore.

Matt

If you do not want your spooled files to automatically be rotated based
on page size, record size, CPI, etc. you need to set the rotation
attribute to zero in the printer file.

Many customer run into this auto rotation problem when they switch from
twinax attached nonHPT or nonASCII printing to HPT printing.  This is
because the printers sometimes have no print borders in one mode and not
in another mode.  One of the classic examples were the 3812 SCS
printers.  When used as a twinax scs printer the whole page was
addressable by the printer and could be printed on.  If you took the
exact same printer with the exact same hardware setup and switch to 3812
Host Print Transform *YES configuration, the same spooled file would
print in landscape (where previously it printed in protrait).  This is
because the printer has a no print border in ascii mode and HPT could
not fit the text within that print addressable area and thus rotated the
printed output because the rotation value was *AUTO.

Sometimes, you can just change your printer file record length to 80 and
the CPI to 10 and you are ok (most printer files have a length of 132
even though the application never prints past 80).

There are numerous places you can reference regarding this subject.  The
IBM Red Books Printing III - V are one place.  The Printer Device
Programming manual may be another.  There are also a number of iSeries
Software Knowledge DB entries that discuss the subject and things that
you can do to solve it.

As was suggested, one solution is to purchase IPDS simms (and PSF/400)
and print using PSF.



--
Rodney A Johnson
Technical Team Lead for AS/400 Spool
Dept GJC
IBM   Rochester, Minnesota

The contents of this message express only the sender's opinion.
This message does not necessarily reflect the policy or views of
my employer, IBM.  All responsibility for the statements
made in this Usenet posting resides solely and completely with the
sender.

Thanks for the help. It seems like an expensive fix for such a simple
problem - you'd think printers and/or software  would default to the basic
settings. I could understand it if I was trying someting complex :)

However, I did try Mochasoft's LPD utility and the printer I tried it on
printed fine! Only downside is it run s thru a PC which, of course, needs to
be on. I'm going to try it on the NT server they have - that's always
running.