Question: PCL vs. Postscript Drivers

[Kyle Stedman]

Hi,

We're running a couple of HP Color LaserJet 3700 printers, networked on a
Windows 2003 network.

Every once in a while, a job will go to the printer which will not print
out properly, and then the printer spits out endless numbers of pages with
meaningless characters printed across the top of the page. The only way to
correct the issue is to power-off the printer. There are no jobs in the
network queue, they've alread passed to the printers memory.

All our printing is straight web stuff or Office stuff. We are using HP
drivers, PCL 5c. Does anyone know why some jobs go bad like this? Would
using Postscript drivers instead of PCL help?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks,
Kyle

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

1. (probably not your case) using a driver for an incompatible printer -
e.g. using a LaserJet driver to send print to a DeskJet printer.
2. data getting lost in transmission from computer to print device firmware
(network or internal printer defect)
3. defect in the printer

HP PCL is esentially a command stream. Printer commands are prefixed with
the Escape character. If the Escape character gets lost, the printer will
treat the commands as data and print them instead of acting on them. This
results in garbage printing, speciallly if there are raster graphics or
heavy use of formatting commands.

You might try a different driver, although if the problem is network or
print device, this might not fix the problem.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...iesId=315849&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=181

 

[rjn]

HP PCL is esentially a command stream. Printer commands
are prefixed with the Escape character. If the Escape character
gets lost, ...

Or if any other damage to the syntax occurs.

A great way to simulate the reported symptom (and waste a
great deal of paper), is to Print-to-File with the PCL driver,
then execute a DOS COPY command of that file to to the LPT
with the "/B" option omitted.

This will cause all instances of certain binary/CTRL characters
to be deleted, expanded, or treated as EOF. These bytes
appear randomly in real binary data, such as PCL graphics
and font downloads.