Why can't I specify Paper source by paper type when printing to Lexmark from Word 2003?

If the lexmark driver does not support paper tray selection by media type, you can't.

I work on various MFPs, and they support selection by tray OR media, for example, if a job is sent to letterhead, it will print from the tray set for that media, you do not need to select the tray. conversely, if you try and print a plain paper job to a tray set for letterhead, it will fail with a media mismatch error.

It sounds like that is how the HP works.

Unfortunately, not all printer drivers support this, not even all PCL printers do.

You could perhaps set the HP to select by media, and the Lexmark to select by tray.

Yes your solution will work, but only with the added step of checking the page setup before every printout - Seems Word doesn't store destination trays on a per-printer basis, only per-document. My users won't like (be able to handle) this.

I've also noticed that the Lexmark and HP codes for trays aren't even the same - a doc saved with lexmark Tray 1 & 2 becomes Auto select if the printer is changed to HP, and vice versa.

Just for kicks, I tried replacing the Lexmark T642 driver with the built-in Lexmark Optra, and the HP with the built-in HP LJ4+ - in that case I could hardcode Upper and Lower tray in the word document and get it to work seemlessly for both printer types - with the unfortunate side effect of having to use the low capacity, fragile MF tray (Tray 1) for Letterhead on the HP.

I'm beginning to fear that even if I could coax a list of media types out of the Lexmark driver, it wouldn't match the HP codes anyway. Any ideas if this is true?

Not as elegant as I'd hoped, but could be much worse! I suppose it does have the advantage of being printer-proof...

Gonna give it a try tomorrow and see how it feels

Sorry for the delay in answering here, been trial-and-erroring this stuff all day :)

So what I've done is add the printer to the print server twice (same driver, same port/IP, different name) but change the "printing preferences" on one of them to force it to take page 1 on letterhead. From the Terminal Server I map up both of them.

It works fine from the Terminal Server, to both HP and Lexmark printers, but I had to set the printing preferences on the letterhead printers on the Terminal Server - these settings were not conveyed from the print server.

here's a summary of my setup then:

Printer:
HP P2055dn, HP P4015x programmed so they know they have letterhead in tray 2 and plain in tray 3

Win2003 print server:
HP Universal Printing PCL 6 (v4.7) driver
2 printers defined for each physical printer, same settings but different names i.e. "P2055dn" and "P2055dn - letterhead"

Win2003 Terminnal server:
2 printers mapped up from print server
printing preferences for both printers: Paper/Quality tab: Paper type = plain
printing preferences for letterhead printer: Paper/Quality tab: Print page 1 on type = letterhead


The nice thing about this setup is that if I open an old word document that is hardcoded to print to a Lexmark Tray 1 and 2, that these settings are ignored (word seems to default to automatically select) and the letterhead settings are then controlled by the user printing to the appropriate printer.

Still have more testing to do, but I think this is the way forward.

Thanks for your help!

I wasn't able to get the Lexmark driver to show paper type options to word. Your solution of setting up two printers for each physical printer, with one forced to print letterhead on page 1, works for both HP and Lexmark printers from Word in my mixed environment.

If you set the preferences in the printer properties>advanced tab>printing defaults button, it should be carried over to the clients

That was the last piece of the puzzle, works for both the HP and Lexmark universal drivers :)  Thanks again!!

No problem :)