Let's suppose you created a document in Word and then used Forms Electric in Create mode to save the overlay as TEST. You will then have on disk an overlay file TEST.OVL and possibly a soft font file TEST.FNT. To use this overlay from a Unix or AS/400 system you must now use the supplied DOS Download utility to "wrap" the macro and assign it a PCL macro id. (This is so the printer can identify and track it in it's memory.) So, to give it the id 1 use:
C> download test /i:1 /o:test.prt
You now have a spool file TEST.PRT which contains the font file and overlay together topped and tailed with the PCL commands to assign the macro the id 1. This file you can upload to your Unix or AS/400 system to store and download from there.
To get the overlay into your printer from your server you can probably use the Unix lp command. As this file can contain raw binary data be sure to use the lp options to spool the file without carriage-return or form feed translation, ie. in raw mode. On some Unix systems you can use lp -oraw test.prt etc. Spooling the overlay this way will download it to your printer's memory where it will remain dormant until your application calls it.
Your Unix application will need to send a PCL command to the printer at the start of its job to instruct the printer to merge this overlay with the application data. The most common command to use is <esc>&f1y4X Be sure to get the lower and upper- case syntax correct. Here <esc> is ASCII 27 the escape character and the 1 is the macro id to correspond that we used in the Download command line. You can put this command anywhere on the first page of data you want the form to be used.
A PCL printer reset command <esc>E at the end of the job (after the last form feed) will turn off the merging but leave the overlay in the printer's memory. This step is optional.
C> download test /i:1 /o:test.prt
You now have a spool file TEST.PRT which contains the font file and overlay together topped and tailed with the PCL commands to assign the macro the id 1. This file you can upload to your Unix or AS/400 system to store and download from there.
To get the overlay into your printer from your server you can probably use the Unix lp command. As this file can contain raw binary data be sure to use the lp options to spool the file without carriage-return or form feed translation, ie. in raw mode. On some Unix systems you can use lp -oraw test.prt etc. Spooling the overlay this way will download it to your printer's memory where it will remain dormant until your application calls it.
Your Unix application will need to send a PCL command to the printer at the start of its job to instruct the printer to merge this overlay with the application data. The most common command to use is <esc>&f1y4X Be sure to get the lower and upper- case syntax correct. Here <esc> is ASCII 27 the escape character and the 1 is the macro id to correspond that we used in the Download command line. You can put this command anywhere on the first page of data you want the form to be used.
A PCL printer reset command <esc>E at the end of the job (after the last form feed) will turn off the merging but leave the overlay in the printer's memory. This step is optional.
RSS Feed
