NetWare 4.1/9000 Print Services

D-7
Troubleshooting Printing Problems
Troubleshooting Notes
Troubleshooting Notes
1. Determining the Printer Language of Your Print Job
Print jobs can be generated in a variety of printer languages. See “Printer
Languages” in Appendix A for a discussion of the various types. Different
applications with printing capability will generate print jobs using different
languages. Similarly, certain printers support some languages but not others.
For example, many PCL printers do not support PostScript printing. (See
Note 2 for more information.)
To be sure you are sending your print job to a printer that can support the
language used by your application, you must determine the language used
by your print job. Sending a print job to a printer that does not support the
printer language used in that print job will produce unexpected results
varying from no printer output to incorrect printer output.
In Windows and DOS applications, the print driver you are using in a
specific application can provide information about the type of job the
application creates when the document is printed. The name of the print
driver can be seen in many applications by choosing the “Select Printer”
option from the file menu.
• Print drivers that generate PostScript print jobs usually have either the word
“PostScript” or the letters “PS” in their names.
• Print drivers that generate PCL print jobs occasionally have the letters “PCL” in
their names but usually make no reference to a the printer language they are
using.
If your application does not allow you to select a print driver, it generates an
ASCII text print job. In DOS, copying or redirecting a text file to an LPT
port “prints” an ASCII text job. For example, TYPE <filename> LPT1 or
DIR > LPT1.
A large family of printer languages, the “page description languages”
(PDLs), including PostScript, do not support printing this type of job.
However, ASCII text files can be printed by non-PDL languages such as
PCL.