PCL or PJL Printing

[egeerdink]

I'm looking to add a command to one of our daily reports to that it will staple each job packet once its done printing. is this possible in PCL? If not, I heard PJL could do it, but Im not familiar with how that would work in 4GL.

 

[joey.jeremiah]

i would definitely recommend against writing reports using pcl or anything at that level.

i have done it before but that was many many years ago.


if you're looking to create graphical reports with borders, images even charts and so on

consider creating a graphical document like pdf, excel, word etc that is printer neutral and print that document.


have a look at libxlsx.p

it will let you create almost any graphical document and even print directly from unix/linux


http://www.oehive.org/project/libxlsx

 

[tamhas]

Seems to me the OP already has the reports ... he just wants to tell the printer, which presumably is equipped with a stapler, to staple some batch of them together.

It is quite possible you won't get an answer to this generally since not many of us have printers with staplers.

I do have a customer who uses a Toshiba copier as their main printer. I don't know if it has a stapler, but I know that the copier has what amounts to a Windows PC built in to it which controls the print functions, so for that we had to set up a print queue on the SCO box which redirected to the Windows machine and to have various queues on the copier which would do landscape, compressed, etc. I believe this is a combination of setup on the copier PC and some command language passed through the SCO queue, but it may be that all of the setup is on the Toshiba and we just pick a queue to send it to.

So, first job is to ask the printer maker about the commands to run the stapler. This may not be standard since it is an unusual capability. You are going to have to determine whether there is a leadin command like "start stapling group now" or whether it just staples whatever is in the hopper. Then, you need to find out whether this is managed by in-line commands or if it is something where you need to do some setup on the printer. All of this might be quite specific to the printer. Once you know that, we are more likely to be able to help figure out how to accomplish it ... but, of course, once you figure that out, you may solve it yourself.

 

[joey.jeremiah]

my mistake.

i misunderstood.