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geriatricgeekFlag for United States of America

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adding a printer to QAD

i am trying to add a Konica Minolta printer to QAD. Where can I find escape characters that will format the printing? I have a bunch of HP printers that are working, but using HP characters for the KM printer will produce a report, but the formatting is off
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DansDadUK
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>> ... Where can I find escape characters that will format the printing? ...

That rather depends on which Page Description Languages are supported by the printer model in question, and which PDL is being assumed/specified via QAD (I know nothing about the latter).

Most business class laser printers support all three of the 'traditional' PDLs:

PCL5 (PCL5e for monochrome devices; PCL5c for colour).

PCL6 (a.k.a. PCL XL).

PostScript (a.k.a. PS).


Many modern ones also support several other 'languages', such as Direct PDF, PCLm/PCLmS.

Of the traditional PDLs, the only one which uses escape sequences is PCL5, so this is probably what you are alluding to.
But does your target device (whatever that is) support it?

Cheaper laser printers, and most home/home office inkjet printers don't support any of these PDLs; they use a variety of proprietary raster-based languages (some of which support a limited range of PCL-like escape sequences).
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Just about every KM printer (certainly the larger ones) supports PCL5 and PostScript. PS does not use "command  characters"  so you cannot easily use that for formatting. However, PCL5 should work just fine. You will need to ensure the printer itself is set to either PCL5 or auto-language-switch. If it were set to PS, it would not print one single character of the entire job.

When you say QAD, I assume you mean QAD's ERP s/w. That may either use the Windows driver, in which case formatting is done in the driver, or it can create its own output. In that case it will most likely send either plain ASCII text (which will print on a PCL5 printer), or it may use PCL5 itself. It is conceivable that it uses PS, especially if it runs on Linux. In the latter case, without extensive knowledge of PS there is little you can do. PS is a programming language, and your commands will need to interact with that and the "program" that describes your printed page. With both PS and PCL5 you will need to make sure that the start of the print file does not reset the printer, as that would make it forget any of your commands.

I have found some PCL5 manuals for the Bizhub 423, but they are all behind pay-walls. You can find the HP manual here. Most of the commends there will work; some, like tray numbers, are device dependent.
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letting the print driver does actually clean up the report because it does not have the escape characters showing at the top of the report. But what i was looking for is to have the report format like a blue bar report as it prints. I think i would need support from QAD which i don't have and is a bigger part of the problem.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. "letting the print driver" implies you are using the driver, but then you talk about formatting the report "like a blue bar report", which may imply you want to bypass the driver. When you print from QAD, is it even possible to bypass the driver?

If you are forced to use a driver, then the only way you can change the report format is in QAD itself. The driver will not let you send special commands as part of the job, it sets up the printer the way you specify in Printer Properties or Page Setup.
What I am trying to achieve is to have pre-formatted reports from QAD print on letter size paper but the reports on screen have the QAD logo and display pronounced columns the have different sized fonts. By taking out the printer set up in QAD, the data will print-but the reports come out with the same generic font. Not the pretty reports that managers like to glance at. If I take out the printer set up characters in QAD, the reports print, data is in columns but the on screen report is fancier. I know i'm not describing this the best, but I think the problem is partly that the QAD version I have is 2009 and the KM printer is brand new.
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taking out the characters is within QAD when I set up the printer, it wants to configure the escape characters. that is what my question is all about. I took them out because it did not improve the printing or format the report.
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