ppr-list-digest volume 2, number 41, message 3

Note: please don't spam any of the e-mail addresses which you see here. Follow this link if you want some addresses to misuse.


From: Damian Ivereigh <damian@cisco.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 13:32:44 +1100
Subject: Re: PPR: ppr and hp printers

Hi Jennifer,

PJL stands for Printer Job Language. It is not the language that is
actually used for printing, but rather a wrapper language - job control.

It is used to perform some limited setup of the printer and then say:
what follows is in Postscript, PCL, HPGL or whatever. Then at the end of
the print job more PJL commands are sent to close off the job.

The great advantage of it is when you have a continuous stream of jobs
you can cancel an individual one (using the printers cancel button for
example) and the printer knows where one job ends and a new one begins.

However the point is that the HP printers will usually quite happily run
without it, just using the TCP connections to deliniate jobs (after each
job, the TCP connection is closed and then re-openend) as long as the
printer supports postscript. That is probably your problem.

I don't believe the 455CM supports postscript at all (only PCL & HPGL),
the 4500N and 4050N however I am almost absolutely sure supports
postscript. Printing a test page should tell you about this.

I am almost absolutely sure you can get PPR to send PJL commands as
well, though I don't know PPR well enough to tell you how.

I hope this helps some

Damian

Jennifer Wong wrote:
> 
> hi,
> 
> i'm running ppr-1.40 on a redhat linux 6.0 server with netatalk and samba
> installed on it, and i am having lots of troubles getting it working!
> 
> my department, unfortunately, has lots of Hewlett-Packard laserjet printers
> (including a colour laserjet 4500N and a designjet 455CM large-format
> printer) and i've been told by some friends that the main reason for this
> is that the HPs don't talk postscript properly, but rather, speak pjl.
> 
> so, the best fix i can think of at the moment is to find some apple
> laserwriter drivers that will support the various options of the printers.
> i would happily use laserwriter II NT, however it doesn't support colour
> or large size paper and only has 300dpi. our laserjet 4050N can print up
> to 1200dpi and i'd like to find a driver which i can use on that.
> 
> does anyone have any suggestions for what i should use? or any other way
> to get around this pjl problem? i can't just pass through the print jobs
> because we are also keeping count of how many pages are being printed etc.
> (esp. for the colour printers).
> 
> regards,
> jenny
> 
> --
> Jennifer Wong                                     ph: 9351 2499
> Computer Systems Officer                         fax: 9351 6009
> Department of Biochemistry G08                mob: 0417 661 611
> The University of Sydney NSW 2008     jenny@biochem.usyd.edu.au