IBM 4400 manual Series Printer Protocol

2 P-Series Printer Protocol

Introduction

This chapter describes the P-Series emulation host control codes. “Emulation” refers to the ability of a printer to execute the commands of a particular printer control language. A printer control language is the coding system used to convey, manipulate, and print data. It contains character codes and command sequences that configure the emulation. In this manual, the terms emulation, printer protocol, and printer control language are synonymous.

In the P-Series emulation mode, your printer can print files coded for the P- Series printer control language. To select the P-Series emulation mode as the active printer emulation, select ASCII Emulation from the EMULATION menu and P-Series from the Printer Protocol menu, as described in the User's Guide.

The P-Series emulation provides many configurable parameters. The default parameter values for this emulation are shown in Table 1. You can modify the emulation parameter values in two ways:

•The P-Series host control codes. An extensive set of P-Series control code commands can be sent to the printer from an attached host computer via the host data stream. Most of this chapter is devoted to describing the P-Series control code commands.

•The printer configuration menus. You can modify a subset of the P- Series emulation parameters using the printer configuration menus, control panel keys and LCD, as described in the User's Guide.

A parameter value set by a host control code generally overrides a value set from the printer's control panel.

NOTE: Configuration values selected from the menus or via host control codes can be saved to the printer's NVRAM memory so that they will not be lost when you power off the printer or reset it to the factory defaults. The menu selection for saving a configuration to memory is described in the User's Guide.To save the configuration using host control codes, refer to Appendix B, “PTR_SETUP Option”.

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