Anyone get any use of an HP MFP M234DWE printer on SCO 5.07?

Wed Nov 23 06:42:52 PST 2022

Walter,
Thank you so much for your answer.  It's so funny, I stayed away from the wireless (and Air) capabilities of this printer, and purposely spent an inordinate amount of time making the static IP work on the ethernet port.  This the only reason I really bought the printer, so it could be placed in the same position as the old (and now completely unusable) old printers that were breaking with just about every print job.   Really a bad situation.

So, I wouldn't think the protocol used to handle the printing might be different based on the delivery method of the document to the printer, although it sounds like even though I'm hitting the port with a job, it is still trying to handle it in this streaming/air PWG manner.  I have not had the time to even investigate what might be wrong.  Since the printer does so well as a Windows printer using whatever driver knows and produces perfect PDF documents, that the same kind of "smarts" might appear when a print job is presented at the ethernet port.  This must not be true.  I have a lot of testing to do.

Just remembetring the old diagnostic routines of sending a pure PCL document directly to the device from the DOS prompt would always be possible to help figure things out... but if the whole protocol is CUPS oriented/aware... there was a utility called HPSmart that offered the ability to add printing from a second/third/etc. printer, and one of the options was Linux. Perhaps, I could try and see what that system uses to make a printout happen.  I will try, but I don't think I will have any luck.... there is a whole lot happening in my life right now... too much to even try and describe it here.

One sentence though.  I'm flat on my back typing on my keyboard which is on my stomach (I don't use a mouse or monitor) and so this is not the most comfortable way to do things... plus the printers are in NJ and I'm in  Arizona!   On October 5th, I had a an accident (if I told you I walked into a door, I know you wouldn't believe me, but that is what happened...) and I broke my back in several places... along the sacrum.  I'm learning more about anatomy and pain then I ever wanted to know, and aside from all the really bad consequences from being flat on my back for the past 6 weeks, they are saying it wil l be several more before I can consider doing anything like "normal" activities again.  Fixing a printing problem like this is the very last thing I would want to be doing.  Ican't scare up the curiosity to investigate everything about a printer before buying it, but in my defense,  $118 brand new, with a paper tray, and worked with Windows and the Air play stuff which is actually great for this old client.  It never occurred to me that sending PDFs to it along an ethernet cable would not work.

Incredibly just two months before I suffered the injury, I joined a really fantastic band... one of the joys retirement allows me to do.  We had done 8 weely rehearsals, and took on several jobs in later December/January.  Just being able to arrange to keep this happening has been the only thing on my mind, and this new unwanted problem just fouls up what I thought would be a simple switch and print situation.

Actually, I'm not at all sure of this, but I haven't even tried a PCL document run through one of Jim's print tables... they always had an ESC-E as the very first character in the init strings.  I was under the impression that most if not all HP printers required this "reset" toclear the printer and get it ready to accept any new document.  Maybe this will take some hybrid of using a blank document that does not have an "eject" command anywhere in it, but just one to clear things up for the next print job to happen, and then it might accept and run out the paper?  I'm probably going to try everything I can think of, even crazy stuff like that.  Or, if the print code table works for a PCL file to print properly by virtue of the printer following some old PCL5 or PCL3 rules, then I might have a chance of this working.  Otherwise, by next Monday, I'll have to have another couple printers there ready and waiting to go in the place of these two new ones which should have worked out of the box.  

Thanks so much

John

More suggestions would be great if anyone can set me onto anything that might make these things function.  I bought a very old copy of a 3 user PrintWizard, about 22 years ago when the Valar Group was still operating... maybe I can get that running and its newer/better implementation of a pcl2pdf converter might make a document that will print.  After buying the copy, I never installed it, but I did get someone to send me a PrintWizard made document that I',m going to send to the printer today once some foks get in to work today.  I don't see anything different about the PDF code immediately, except the Ver 1.4 of the PrintWizard conversion instead of my very old pcl2pdf utility which constructs only Ver 1.3 docs.., so unless the printer is actually looking for something like that, there is probably not going to be much help there.
I should contact Bob and see what he thinks, but he is mostly retired now as well, and I'm just feeling very lucky to have this forum to ask questions of.  Thank you to everyone still frequenting this great place!

/john

.   

-----Original Message-----
From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+john=timescape.com at lists.celestial.com> On Behalf Of Walter Vaughan Jr via Filepro-list
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2022 5:31 AM
To: 'Filepro List' <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Subject: RE: Anyone get any use of an HP MFP M234DWE printer on SCO 5.07?

John,

I think you are on to something. "PCLm is a backwards-compatible subset of PDF which is designed to be streamable (it's not possible for later parts of the file to change previous parts, so pages can be printed in order without processing the entire file at once)." 

Supported Printer Languages for your printer from the HP website are PCLmS = what you are trying to use, designed for printing from mobile devices, URF = Apple Air Play Raster Printing, PWG = Printer Working Group Raster which is a subformat of CUPS Raster

I think the rabbit hole I would go down would be the PWG if you have no luck with tinkering with Postscript to make it stream compliant.

Good Luck!

-----Original Message-----
From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+wvaughan=steelerubber.com at lists.celestial.com> On Behalf Of john--- via Filepro-list
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2022 2:40 AM
To: 'Filepro List' <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Subject: Anyone get any use of an HP MFP M234DWE printer on SCO 5.07?

This printer looked better than the other cheap offerings.  Reasonable paper tray, Had an ethernet port, etc.  It was on sale from $268 down to $218, and then for a couple days last week, Amazon had a 46% off sale, making them $118.  Sort of hard to pass up... when the two printers being replaced are too old to print anymore, broken paper trays, rollers, etc.,etc.

I usually change most documents to PDFs before I send them to the printers that were in place before these new acquisitions.  They  do not seem to like the documents.  It only shows a 01 (as if it is getting 1 document to print), but it never starts the printout.  Very annoying.

It prints PDFs just fine from Windows of course using the driver from Windows. 

However, my pcl2pdf converter on this sco 5.7 only makes PDF vers 1.3 files.  They had no trouble printing on the  previous HP printers.  each using the static addressthat they had before.

I was sort of hoping (against hope) that this would be a pretty good fit, just a matter of plugging in the same network cable to the new printer, setting the static IP to the correct IP, .and it would all fly.  Done all that, and this strange no printout problem.

I actually did not think it would do PCL5, so I have not tried to send any of the PCL5 output formats directly to it.  I'm just thinking that won't work at all... although the old printer had PCL5 and printed them fine also.

Any ideas on what I could be missing?

I have to do something quick.  There are now two of these new printers acting as doorstops except for printouts from Windows machines... which is only half the game?

The very first line in the PDF files is something like PDF VER 1.3.  Could the printer work only on Ver 1.4 or something strange like that?

I will try tomorrow changing the first line to a Ver 1.4 and see if that has any effect, but so far nothing else has had any effect at all.

I'm using a netcat interface which used to print PCL files, PDF files and plain text files directly to the last HP printer just fine. On the M234DWE printers they get to the printer, but do not eject the paper with the nice print on it.  ☹  

TIA for any suggestions that might help.
JJE

--
John Esak
Tucson, Arizona

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