Experiences

Printing width

Printing the DIN A4 testpage (format-a4-portrait.pdf) with SPL_DINA4_TYPE results into a left border of 7 mm, while printing the same PDF with SPL_LETTER_TYPE reduces this border to about 3.5 mm and the inner rectangle of this PDF can be seen at the right border as well.

So, SPL_LETTER_TYPE has a print width of about 210 mm - 4 mm - 3.5 mm = 202.5 mm The letter format has a real width of 215.9 mm. So, I guess the print width for it is about: 8 mm margin at the left border, 202.5 mm print width and about 5 mm margin at the right border

Printer's State

When the driver starts, the printer reports it is busy, since it reports 0x98 as its status (#LPGETSTATUS). It is its warm-up phase.

So, after a powercycle, the printer reports 0x98 (e.g. busy) and then after a while 0x18 (e.g. idle).

Printer's State

The status information read from the printer isn't perfect. When printing starts, the printer begins to report "busy" after sending the second page.

And since it isn't trivial to distinguish a printing state from a power saving state, the printer is reported as idle when it still prints the last pages of a job (due to from the driver's point of view, the print job is already finished).

Same for power up. After switching on the printer device, it is reported as in "power down" mode. After a few seconds it changes to "idle".