>Ed,
> Is there a list of HP printers that run thru the GDI and no longer use PCL? ... or are virtually all new HP's going to be a headache? We have numerous issues with HP printers including:
>
1xxx series - a complete writeoff - they're strictly GDI printers
2xxx series - the HP distributed printer drivers are strictly GDI, but the printers themselves have a relatively unsophisticated PCL rendering engine. Adding memory and using the laserJet III or LaserJet 4 Plus drivers from an MS distribution disk will make them behave, albeit at the expense of some of the fancier HP extensions to the GDI driver versions
4050 and 4100 series - they have problems, but they're related to the HP driver not reseting the FPU properly after a GDI call. Using them with the MS distributed 5si drivers seems to be a uniformly good solution; their PostScript drivers are compliant as well.
8100 series - the new drivers support GDI, PCL 5, PCL 6 and PostScript. I use them with the 5si driver I use for the 4050 successfully, and their PostScript driver is compliant.
Color Lasers - a mixed bag - their PCL 5 and PostScript drivers seem to work, and the QMS Color driver from the MS distribution seems to be a good alternative.
> 1. Funky wrapping of memo fields on reports (FP2.6) - Certain characters cause the memo to wrap in mid sentence (and No, there's no hidden control characters in the string). Doesn't happen with all printers. We can get around it by changing the font size in some cases... in others we change from Arial to Helvetica... This problem occurs mostly with HP Deskjets which we can sometimes fix by installing the HP 550c driver.
>
I don't have a fix for their inkjet stuff; there's no easy substitution for inkjets as there is for lasers.
> 2. Report crashes FP and VFP on some printers (usually LaserJets like the 1100, 2100, and 4050). The fix in some cases is to install the HP 4M driver.
>
See my notes above.
> 3. Only some lines of a memo field print- On some machines only the 2nd line of a 3 line memo field prints. Again this is usually on LaserJets. This does not happen with any other manufacturer's printers.
>
No idea here.
> 4. FP won't work with USB HP printers because HP no longer supports 16-bit programs with their printer drivers.
>
FPW will work with USB printers; you must refer to them by printer name, not by port, and the name must be Win16 compliant, which means short names with no embedded punctuation. You can also share them to a network, and then map the share to a printer port using NET USE, the Win32API WNetAddConnection2() or WNetAddConnection3() API call, or through the Wscript.Network COM object.
>We have 12,000 users and 80% of our support calls are on HP Printer problems.
>
Not surprising.
