Customizing Terminal and Printer Type Files with the Workstation Configurator (32022-90031)

18 Chapter 1

Introducing Workstation Conﬁgurator

What Characteristics are Modiﬁable?

characters will be echoed to the terminal screen once or twice (the ﬁrst

echo occurs as the data is typed ahead; the second echo occurs when the

data is used in subsequent reads). Using Workstation Conﬁgurator,

typeahead can be enabled and the choice of one or two echoes of input

characters can be speciﬁed.

Printer Control

When a printer acts as a spooled system printer, different people can

use the printer in different ways. In order to insure that one user who

changes the printer’s characteristics (such as margins, tabs, or print

density) does not affect the next user who does not want to use those

characteristics, an initialization string can be speciﬁed.

An initialization string sets the printer to a known and repeatable

state. When a device (conﬁgured as a printer) is ﬁrst opened, the

initialization string (up to 120 characters) is automatically sent to the

printer by the driver. For spooled printers, this occurs at the beginning

of every spool ﬁle sent to the printer.

Printer control functions provide control for printers. Using

Workstation Conﬁgurator, an initialization string can be deﬁned, and

parameters can specify the status wait-time, the status retries, and the

FOPEN wait-time. The status wait-time and status retries customize the

status request protocol. FOPEN wait-time maintains a remote

connection over multiple print (spool) ﬁles.

Vertical Format Control

Many line printers allow the use of Vertical Format Control (VFC). VFC

instructs a printer to skip to a predetermined place on the page with

certain carriage control directives instead of counting and displaying a

number of blank lines and spaces.

Up to 16 VFC channels can be supported by a device with each channel

representing one or more places within the vertical page. Each channel

performs a standard skip function such as skip to top of next page, skip

one line, skip to next quarter page, and so forth. Some serial printers

allow the use of VFC through a set of character sequences. To skip to a

particular VFC channel, the corresponding character sequence is sent

to the device.

With Workstation Conﬁgurator, each VFC character sequence (up to 16)

can be deﬁned. When one of the VFC carriage controls is used, the

driver generates the character sequence necessary to move the printer

carriage to the proper channel.