RE: [WinMac] hp printers used by mac's

Parker, Douglas(douglas.parker[at]lmco.com)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:46:21 -0500

I have HPs in my department. One printer, an HP4MV, has an NT queue named
ORL1014094. In my chooser, I see

        ORL1014094 and
        ORL10140941,

the second one adding a number '1' and I believe is an AppleTalk queue
broadcast from the external JetDirect.

Keep this in mind, if you haven't figured it out (it took me a while to get
it): WIN systems can print to the HPs, because the WIN drivers generate PCL
and the printers understand PCL out of the box. (Of course, if the printers
have the PS ROM installed, then they understand both PCL and PS.) If you set
up an NT queue for both Macs and WIN to print to, the WIN systems will print
fine, but since the Macs generate PS--not PCL--they will most likely
generate error messages at the printer. Why?

When an NT print queue is created, by default there's a software RIP that
gets associated with the NT queue for RIPping postscript. But this RIP is
expecting its input to be the same type of data as would be sent to a
printer with a plain, LaserWriter v.27 personality. When you send your Mac
output to the LJ5 via your NT queue, the RIP looks at the PostScript and
can't process it because the codes for the LJ5 are not recognizable as LW
v.27 PostScript. Thus the error messages print out. To get *some* kind of
output from your LJ5, setup the printer in your Chooser as a LW v.27.

BTW, how do you get a PPD for the LJ5 for the Mac? The disks that ship with
the HPLJ5 are all windows PCL, and there's no mention of postscript anywhere
on the floppies. What I did was to install the WIN PPD on a WIN95 system,
and when the installation was done, I searched for *.ppd. An HPLJ5_4.PPD
file is created in the WIN system folder. I copied that to the Mac, opened
it in Word to delete the line feed characters, and I use that PPD on my Mac.

Incidentally, they way I've decided to run printers in my department is to
have WIN systems print through the NT queues, and I have an AppleShare IP
server with print services running my print queues for the Macs. All of my
Macintosh queues in the chooser start with 'Mac', and the names mimic the NT
queue names of the existing printers. Thus a printer with an NT queue named

        ORL1014094

also has an AppleTalk queue named

        Mac ORL1014094.

Fortunately for me, our plant has been condensed into one AppleTalk zone. By
prefixing the AppleTalk queues with 'Mac', all the Mac AppleTalk queues are
listed together in the Chooser.

DP
> ----------
> From: Klun, Mike L.
> Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 1998 11:54 AM
> Subject: hp printers used by mac's
>
> I have hp 5's and hp 4000tn's. I have assigned names for the appletalk
> name and I have created a printer on our nt server. The printer is
> shared for the pc's.
> When I look in the chooser on the Mac's I see two printer names for the
> same printer. Do I need to shut off appletalk on the individual
> printer? What do I need to do to make only one printer name show up in
> the chooser?
>
> Thanks for any help to can give me.
> Mike Klun
> Network Admin.
> Chisago Lakes Schools
>
>

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Thu Nov 12 1998 - 07:51:28 PST