Printing from DOS to Tray 2?

[KenL]

Hello all. I have been scanning thru the posts and have not seen any reference to Printing in DOS to tray 2 yet.

Is it possible?

Ken

[Dias de verano]

Tray 2 on what kind of printer? 

[Aegis]

My (very) limited experience suggests that selecting a tray is done at the print driver level.  Even in the old days of using DOS, I don't remember a way to point a print job to a particular tray output.

This is, by no means, the last word on the subject!! 

[Dias de verano]

If the printer supports PCL5 then commands can be sent to select the tray. Many HP printers support this.

[KenL]

Sorry, it is an HP4000

Dias de verano, can you supply the DOS commands to do this please? I have never seen anything like this.

Ken

[Aegis]

Yes, this is interesting...

[Dias de verano]

They are called 'escape sequences'. This used to be the way printers were controlled. Dot matrix and laser printers especially used printer control languages such as ESC-P (Epson) and various flavours of PCL (HP and others). The HP4000 can use PCL5e I believe. Check a PCL5 reference manual for details of how to control the printer using Escape Sequences.

There are PCL5 drivers on the HP CDROM that came with the printer. If you do not have it, contact HP.

[Dusty]

Escape Sequences for the HP4000 are here.

 

[Aegis]

I'd completely forgotten about escape sequences -- completely.

Let us know, KenL, how this works out for you.

[KenL]

I looked up the escape sequences and this is not going to work for me. I would have to embed this into every report I produce and thus would require my client to print from tray 2 for every printer/report.

I need something I can trigger by the print statement or by setting up a separate Queue on the server which defaults to the second tray. As of right now I have told my client to purchase another printer.

I still want to figure this out. I have also looked at using START/MIN NOTEPAD /P filename.txt but that messes with the page length so my headings are not at the top of the page.

I have also looked into creating a PDF file. One I tried from SourceForge.net required installing all kinds of other software (python, etc) and didn't work so I gave up.