Section 6: Troubleshooting
6.2 USING THE CENTRONICS (PARALLEL) INTERFACE (CONT’D)
4. When you send the print job to the printer and it | Observations |
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does not respond, and there is no error message |
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on the PC: |
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A.Check your data stream for some of the basics. Is your job framed as follows?
<ESC>A—DATA—<ESC>Z
B.Verify that you’ve included all required parame- ters in the data stream.
C.Verify the following:
•You have not typed a “0” (zero) for an “O” (letter) or
•You have not missed any <ESC> characters where they’re needed.
•Make sure all printer command codes are capital letters.
•Your protocol codes are set for Standard or
5.If you’ve checked all of the above and the printer still isn’t printing, you may want to try a Receive Buffer Hex Dump to determine what (if anything) the printer is receiving from your computer. To print Hex Dumps see page
The Centronics port is now listening for incoming data. Send your print job. The printer will now print (only once) a Hexa- decimal (Hex) Dump of everything it received from the host computer. Each
6.While checking the Hex Dump printout, look out for the sequence 0D 0A, which is a combination of Carriage Return and Line Feed characters. The command string should be continuous, and you should not see CR or LF characters between the Start Command (<ESC>A) and the Stop Com- mand (<ESC>Z).
If you are using BASIC, it may be adding these characters automatically as the line wraps. Adding a “width” statement to your program can help to suppress these extra 0D 0A characters by expanding the line length up to 255 characters. See the beginning of the Programming Reference, under Command Codes, for details on writing a program in BASIC.
If you are not programming in BASIC, check to see if you have an equivalent statement in the language you’re using, to suppress extra carriage returns and line feeds from your data being sent out to the printer. The data stream should be one complete line going to the printer.
Page | GT Series Operator’s Manual |
