Character Mode Printing

---

Character mode, or flat ASCII text printing, is the primary output format utilized in Oracle E-Business Suite and was once the only output type available. It is widely accepted as a de facto file format, readable from any number of browsers and applications on any OS platform.

To facilitate printing of these reports, Oracle E-Business Suite facilitates the registering and configuring of many different kinds of printers through four forms accessible through the sysadmin responsibility within the application. All four forms are located under the Install menu path. They are printer, printer types, print styles, and printer driver. Before a report can be printed on any given printer, that printer's driver (or a generic printer driver that closely matches the PCL commands required for that printer) has to be registered with the application. When working through these forms, you will be required to provide specific information about your printer. Oracle does not provide printer drivers, patches, or updates for printers that you will be using for the Oracle E-Business Suite. That said, there are several predefined driver examples included with an installation. These drivers are for the most common and popular printer types that are often used with Oracle Applications and one of these sample printer drivers may easily work for your printer as is or with some minor modifications. However, as the applications administrator or applications DBA, you will likely be tasked with a significant portion of setting up the printing capabilities and therefore either need to be familiar with the printer's operation and capabilities or have access to someone with that knowledge. Due to the variations from vendor to vendor, either having access to someone familiar with the particular printers that you are dealing with in house or a contact at the hardware company would be a big help in the process. Note 200359.1, dealing with the FNDPrinterValidation115.sh script, will be a valuable tool in making sure that your printers and their setups are doing what you think they are. This script checks your printer's configuration and setup within Oracle Applications and breaks down the most common escape sequences used in the Printer Control to assist you in better understanding exactly what is being sent to the printer.

Unless specifically instructed to do so, any printer will print with its initial set of default settings. Typically, these settings are common or basic printing attributes like paper orientation, typeface, spacing, and pitch (10 cpi). These settings are in effect from the time that the printer is turned on through all print jobs that get routed to it unless the settings are overridden. You can override the default settings by physically changing settings on the printer, by controlling the printer program, or through a set of preappended, appended, or embedded commands.

If you examine an Oracle Applications printer driver, you will notice that it has two fields: the Rest field and the Initialization field. These fields are used to pre- and postappend printer control commands to a report that gets sent to the printer and may contain a series of commands that together are usually referred to as an initialization string or a reset string. Before any report gets sent to the printer, the Concurrent Manager converts these strings to incorporate the ASCII escape code character equivalences and appends those strings to the document. Nearly any of the printer's default settings can be overridden using an initialization string.

The makeup of the inialization string is printer or printer manufacturer dependent. This is the reason that the basic initialization string has to be obtained from the printer vendor or from the manuals that accompanied the printer. While the Hewlett Packard PCL language has become nearly the standard among printer manufacturers, there are still companies that do not make use of the language in their initialization strings. The current version of PCL is Version 6, however most versions are backward compatible to a certain extent, meaning that a newer printer can quite probably understand the commands that are sent with a PCL4 or a PCL5 command. What follows is a simple PCL string:

 /eE/e&l1O/e(s0P/el8D/e&k4S 

Part of this string is Oracle Applications specific; part of it is printer driver specific:

• /e designates the string as the beginning of the PCL command.

• /eE says here is the command, reset the machine's defaults.

• /e&10 tells it to print landscape (/e&10O says print it portrait).

If you examine the documentation that can be obtained from the printer manufacturer, the commands in the initialization string can easily be deciphered and a new string constructed to achieve exactly the outcome that you are trying to obtain. One thing that you should always remember is that no matter what you tell the printer via the string, it will not allow you to exceed the printer's inherent capabilities. If you provide it with inappropriate commands, you may find truncated, blank, or just plain unreadable output.

Table 7.1 shows some basic strings that may work with most HP LaserJet printers.

LANDSCAPE

Letter paper, 45 lines per page (6 lines/inch) at 12cpi: /eE/e&l2a1O/e(s0p16.67H/e&k9.5H Letter paper, 45 lines per page (6 lines/inch) at 16.67cpi: /eE/e&l2a1O/e(s0p16.67H/e&k8H Letter paper, 66 lines per page (8.8 lines/inch) at 16.6cpi: /eE/e&l2a1o5.45C/e(s0p16.67H

PORTRAIT

Letter paper, 60 lines per page (6 lines/inch) at 10cpi: /eE/e&l2a0O/e(s0p10H Letter paper, 66 lines per page (6.6 lines/inch) at 10cpi: /eE/e&l2a0o7.27C/e(s0p10H Letter paper, 80 lines per page (8 lines/inch) at 10cpi: /eE/e&l2a0o8D/e(s0p10H

LANDWIDE

Letter paper, 45 lines per page (6 lines/inch) at 16.67cpi: /eE/e&l2a1O/e(s0p16.67H Letter paper, 66 lines per page (8.8 lines/inch) at 16.6cpi: /eE/e&l2a1o5.45C/e(s0p16.67H

If these initialization strings were used on an HP LaserJet 4P printer, the escape character translations would be in Table 7.2.

Table 7.2: Escape Character Translations

Escape Code	Translation
/e&l1O	Landscape orientation
/e&l0O	Portrait orientation
/e(s0P	Fixed primary spacing
/e&a#L	Left margin e.g., /e&a4L (left margin of four columns, where # is the number of columns)
/e&k0S	10.0 characters per inch
/e(s4S	Condensed printing
/e&k2S	Compressed printing (16.5 to 16.7 characters per inch)
/e&k4S	Elite 12.0
/e(8U	Roman-8 font
/e&l#D	Lines per inch e.g., /e&l8D = eight lines per inch (valid values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 48)

---