Printing Help

[Brian K. White]

On 9/27/2010 11:48 AM, Guy Templin wrote:
> Jim,
>
> That is what I have and the printer still pages like 60 lines .
>
> Here is the print code used for 6 lpi landscape
>
> $1b&l2a1o6d3e45F %41 %42
>
> Thanks.

That tells the printer what to do, but it sounds like you may not have 
told filepro what to do.

Basically you've told the _printer_ "Don't exceed 45 lines per page. If 
you have printed 45 lines since the last page break, then stop, do a 
page break, reset the line counter to 1, and resume printing the 
incoming data and counting lines as you go until it hits 45 again..." 
That's nice and all, it's technically correct to set that up if you know 
your form is 45 lines, but isn't really necessary or the important part 
for filepro. In fact, if your output format is set up right, the printer 
should never actually end up invoking this auto page break, because your 
output format will have already done a page break itself just before the 
printer would have done it at the end of every page.

What seems to be missing is, the default age length in hplaser.prt is 60 
lines. If you don't override that in your output format F8 options, then 
filepro will output 60 lines before it inserts a page break. Since 
you've told the printer to automatically insert it's own page break 
every 45 lines, you get exactly what you are seeing. filepro outputs 60 
lines and then a page break and then another 60...
The printer receives this, inserts it's own page break at 45 lines, 15 
lines later filepro's page break comes along, the printer resets its 
line count at every page break not just the ones it inserted itself, so 
you get another solid 45 lines after filepro's page break, 45, 15, 45, 
15, ...

So, you need to go into the F8 options of the output format and set both 
number of lines per page and number of lines to print per page both to 
45. That tells filepro not to output more than 45 lines between breaks 
in the first place and makes the printer page length init code superfluous.

-- 
bkw