Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

3595.0. "HplaserJet printing 'duff' characters" by KERNEL::VANRIXTELE (Emma van Rixtel) Mon Nov 29 1993 10:20

               <<< MAGIC::USER6:[NOTES$LIBRARY]WPS-PLUS.NOTE;1 >>>
                            -< WPS-PLUS Version 4 >-
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Note 1412.0         HPLaserjet III printing 'duff' characters            1 reply
KERNEL::VANRIXTELE "Emma van Rixtel"                 34 lines  12-NOV-1993 07:14
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    ALL-IN-1 V3.0-1
    
    Hi, I have a customer who is having problems printing to an HPlaserjet.
    They receive a lot of E-mail from France (containing foreign
    characters) and when they come to print it out to the Hplaserjet III
    (using print style of HPLJIII), it will print duff characters. Printing 
    the same document to an LN03 or a DEClaser will print correctly. For 
    example, an e with an accent will print out on the laserjet as an O 
    with a squiggle above it!!
    
    They do not know what product they are using in France to send the mail
    messages other than it does not come in a  WPS-PLUS format, but Gold 
    getting the document back into WPS-PLUS seems to solve the problem and 
    it will then print correctly.
    
    They can reproduce the problem by creating a text file using any other
    editor other than WPS-PLUS, printing to the LN03 or DEClaser will print
    ok, but the HPlaser jet will behave as before until the text file is
    converted into the WPS-PLUS format.
    
    Has anyone heard of this before, it is really weird as they can see the
    correct characters on the screen when they first receive the mail
    message, but some how the HPLaserjet does not seem to understand
    anything other than WPS-PLUS. Although Gold getting the documents in
    temporarily solves the problem, they are not prepared to do this all
    the time considering the large amount of E-mail messages they receive
    a day.
    
    We have done various tests, but I have now run out of ideas, so if
    anyone can suggest anything else, I would gratefully appreciate it.
    
    Thanks 
    
    Emma van Rixtel 


p.s. I was asked to cross post this to ALL-IN-1 to see if anyone else had any 
     other ideas!

My guess is that the Data Type of the E-mail message from France is ASCII,
and that it uses ISO Latin-1 to encode characters with accents.  The
messages display correctly on a terminal because VTs understand ISO Latin-1. 

The customer's system is configured so that when ASCII messages are printed
the ALL-IN-1 ASCII formatter is used to create the listing file.  This
formatter only supports ISO Latin-1 output, and therefore a listing file
with ISO-Latin-1 encoding is sent to the HP LJ-III printer which does not
understand this character set. 

The customer's system is configured so that when WPS-PLUS message are
printed the WPS-PLUS formatter is used to create the listing file.  The
WPS-PLUS formatter does support creating listing files for HP LJ-III
printers. 


If you change the Handling of the message to 'STANDARD ASCII' the will 
cause ALL-IN-1 to format the ASCII message using the WPS-PLUS formatter, 
and therefore an HP LJ-III will be created.

You could also change the 'ASCII EDT' FORMAT master entry 'WPS-PLUS 
formatting (Y/N):' field from 'N' to 'Y' which will result in all ASCII 
documents being formatted using the WPS-PLUS formatter.


Richard