What is the native resolution of the printer?

Hammer wrote on Feb 18^th, 2008 at 7:20pm:

When I try this, it starts printing exactly at the half way point of the width of the paper.  I guess I'm completely misunderstanding how NewPage controls the page layout.

Hammer wrote on Feb 18^th, 2008 at 8:20pm:

In practice, with this thermal printer, it doesn't work that way.  If I set it to (634,1218), printing at X=0 causes the printer to start printing at about the center of the receipt.  If I set it to (850,1100), printing at X=0 causes it to print at the left edge of the receipt.  I don't understand why the X=0 behavior is different simply because I changed the grid dimensions.  The nice thing was that the (634,1218) setting fixed the problem with the paper waste, but since it doesn't print to the left edge, it only solves one issue while creating another.  I'm sure it has something to do with how the USB driver for this printer handles the interface. But I've never dealt with thermal printers before this project, so I'm clueless here.  I suspect that you and the other good folks at Lantica probably don't have an easy answer to this, but I'm hoping...

Hammer wrote on Feb 18^th, 2008 at 9:18pm:

Unfortunately, the printer is at the client site, which I won't be back to now for at least a few days.  So it'll be a while before I can do any more hands on testing.

Hammer wrote on Feb 18^th, 2008 at 9:18pm:

They don't appear to be.

Well, I did take the time to go back to the client site and run some tests.  I setup a sample application so that I could quickly test.  And unfortunately, things regressed, so that now I'm always wasting paper.  I guess I'll have to chalk this up to a printer oddity.  What's really unusual is that the Y position varies depending on how much you print.  For example, if I set the NewPage to 850,1100 and then print to 0,1100, it only prints about two inches down.  But if I print at 0,700, 0,800, 0,900 , 0,1000 and 0,1000, it spaces out each thing evenly, except for the 0,0 to 0,700, which is only about double the spacing of between 0,800 and 0,900.

So the printer is apparently auto-adjusting in some manner.  But it doesn't say anything about doing it in the manual.  And the manual is geared towards sending custom codes, which is probably what the printer driver is doing after Sesame submits the document for printing.

Thanks attempting to help.

EDIT: Further digging into the printer manual allowed me to find an option that corrected the issue.  Thanks for helping me to better understand NewPage.

Hammer wrote on Feb 19^th, 2008 at 8:56pm:

There's an option called "Page Length" which sets the "default form feed page length".  Seemed obvious once I finally found it.  I turned the option off and everything worked fine using a NewPage of 850,1100.

The odd thing about this whole issue was how the printer reacted to the things I fed into it from Sesame.  Since it behaved differently based on different settings, and had a different form feed length depending on the printed output, it led me down the track of believing that the issue had to be a print configuration issue with the software and not a printer setting issue with the hardware.

In my prior software experience, I've rarely had to deal with peripherals.  I guess I should be glad.  What a headache.  I probably wasted a whole roll of thermal paper in an attempt to save paper.  And don't get me started on the headaches I had trying to resurrect a dot matrix printer.  Stupid government mandates...