We have several network printers, plus a few local desktop printers for certain jobs (eg. letterheaded paper jobs). One of these started to smoke - nasty habit for humans, pretty grim for a printer.

Being a smart-alec, I thought we could send these special documents to one of the lower trays of a network printer, then that tray could be full of the right paper all the time and no-one else would print their stuff on it by accident.

We use Netware, so I first had to find out how to set up a new printer description/queue thing in there. This wasn't too difficult (look up nwadmin on the net if you need to know about this). Then, I had to find out the right escape code to tell the printer to use the lower tray. It seems most printers now will understand HP PCL codes for this. I still had to look it up for our specific printer, and that is recommended.

When I had all this set up, I reset the desktop workstation, printed and waited smuggly for the right thing to pop out.

Well, it came out, but it printed across multiple sheets rather than the single sheet it was meant to.

Ok, I thought, let's see what the internet has on this one. After a lot of searching I thought I'd pinned it down to the timeout being too short. So back to NWadmin to up the timeout value. It still came out on multiple sheets.

I tinkered about with this on and off for a few days, but still couldn't fix it. Meanwhile, the staff who use it were getting increasingly annoyed at having to type their letters up manually.

Time to sort it out, I thought. My choice seemed to be 1. get the original printer fixed or 2. buy another.

It cost roughly the same to do both so I ordered a printer (checking it would print ok from a dos system with no drivers first).

2 days later, printer arrives. This prints out across multiple pages also. *$£#!!!

Back to the internet. Eventually I found a very short description of the problem on Novell's site. The other possible cause they gave was 'incorrect reading of escape characters by the printer'.

The dos program which produces these printouts is a legacy system, custom-written by someone who doesn't work at our place anymore. If we need anything adjusting in the program we now have to pass it on to a software support company. So I rang them up and asked them to check it out.

A bit later, a guy there rang back and said 'er, I think there's something funny in there. Something like escape+e, and escape+f ?'

Bingo!

I quickly checked the web and found out these were Epson ESC/P2 escape characters. Most non-Epson printers don't recognise these. Our new one was HP and the network printers are Canons.

I told the software support guy to whip the codes out. A new version of the program was received which now works (although we lost the slight formatting that the escape codes applied).