HP 4300 PROBLEM driving me crazy!! 1

[optmiuscrime]

Hey all. I need a little bit of help.

We have an HP 4300 that is dropping characters

It will drop a single character of a single font and at a single font size all the way trough the document. It is mainly vowels and never capitals. It happens in word rightfax outlook on NT and xp and have been able to recreate it will all firmware revisions and going direct IP printing from a laptop directly connected to the printer. It happens both on printer appliances and servers

we have replaced all parts that can be replaced (Memory network card and formatter board)

Any one seen this before ?

 

[DansDadUK]

Are you sure it is printer-related, and not driver-related?

If you can recreate the problem at will, do so but use the 'print to file' option to direct the driver output to a file.

Then copy this file to the problem printer (to confirm that the fault is still present), and ALSO copy the same file to another printer of the same generation (not necessarily same make/model).

To copy 'file.prn' file to a printer:

If printer is parallel-port connected:
copy /b file.prn LPT1:

If printer is directly-connected to network:
lpr -S ip-address -P queue-name file.prn

where:
ip-address is TCP/IP address of printer
queue-name is name of a queue on printer; for most HP printers, this can be anything (e.g. 'any') but some printers require specific values (e.g. 'lpt1-passthru').

If the problem appears on BOTH printers, this implies a driver problem; if you posted the .prn file somewhere, it could be analysed to see how the fonts were being used (e.g. resident, download bitmap, download scalable) etc. which might give a clue.

 

[optmiuscrime]

Tryed two different drivers pcl6 and Pcl5e both same problem. Have not tryed printing to a file but will try thanks for the suggestion. Personaly I thing it is a printer issue though

 

[netmanrick]

Use the menu to print out the printer fonts(pcl). Thia will test the print engine only,not the jet direct or parallel interfaces.
If this works ok confidence is high the problem is interface
or application problem.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations