IT - Printer Escape Comands

[TSM]

The last time i had to worrey about doing printer escape commands was on a nix box about 4 years ago. In that time i have not done it so have forgotten realy how to do it.

Basicly i need to send some custom commands to a ND2700 (dot matrix) printer to do some stuff.

This is the sequence: ESC [ P3 ; P0 SP r

P being just single value like 3 which gets converted to 33 hex etc..

I put it first into HEX, but our finance system only accepts decimal so i converted it to.

HEX: 1B 5B 33 3B 30 20 72
DEC: 027 091 051 059 048 032 114

I put this in a text file then do the folowing command:

COPY nd.txt LPT2 /b

All it does it print out the sequence instead of actualy doing what i want it to do (our printer can automaticly load diffrent types of paper into it).

Any ideas?

wha.......


Have you tried turning it off and on again ?

[TSM]

Originally Posted by Iansv

wha.......


Have you tried turning it off and on again ?

Yep, dont try that silly trick with me me.

Originally Posted by TSM

Yep, dont try that silly trick with me me.

IS IT PLUGGED IN?

[TSM]

Originally Posted by Sudoxe

IS IT PLUGGED IN?

no, i decided it was better to have it unplugged for no reason other than it made me feal better.

try dropping the /b

afaik your trying to send ascii commands to the printer, the /b may just confuse the issue ....

but I'm probably wrong

PM the txt file if you want, two heads better than one and all that

[TSM]

Originally Posted by rigor

try dropping the /b

afaik your trying to send ascii commands to the printer, the /b may just confuse the issue ....

but I'm probably wrong

PM the txt file if you want, two heads better than one and all that

ive think i tried it without the /b

all the text file has is one of these lines (without the DEC/HEX bit):

HEX: 1B 5B 33 3B 30 20 72
DEC: 027 091 051 059 048 032 114

If its accepted it should not print out anything just change some settings, instead it prints the escape sequence.

Originally Posted by TSM

This is the sequence: ESC [ P3 ; P0 SP r

HEX: 1B 5B 33 3B 30 20 72
DEC: 027 091 051 059 048 032 114

Any ideas?

I think you may have dropped a couple of characters in your ASCII > Hex > Dec conversion ..

I get
Hex: 1B 5B 50 33 3B 50 30 53 50 72
Dec: 027 091 080 051 059 080 048 083 080 114

P seems to be missing at the start, and the ends different ... worth a try?

I remember doing this years ago, but I don't have the doc's for it anymore. Though I could have sworn you need to set some jumpers so that it can be updated. Then set them pack for normal printing, I know I wasn't happy when some fool reset the printer and I had to sort the paper types out again.

Ah, Newbury Data - good printers, or they were 20 years ago when I last fiddled with one. Looking at the control codes you're trying, looks like it's doing Epson emulation, which seems to be an option. There's an Epson ref. manual here. It's a PDF file. Bin control looks like Esc EM - pg C-157. The EM code has a decimal value of 25, so a bin select command is just 3 bytes long. The best thing to use to create the file is [shock, horror], good old EDIT. You can enter a control code by typing a Ctrl-P first. Esc is Ctrl-[, EM is Ctrl-Y. So, at a command line, invoke EDIT with your target file name. Then enter ctrl-P, ctrl-[, ctrl-P, ctrl-Y, n, where 'n' is the ascii bin number.

Your COPY /b is what I'd do too.