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Section 6: Troubleshooting
Page 6-2 GT Series Operator’s Manual
6.2 USING THE CENTRONICS (PARALLEL) INTERFACE (CONT’D)
4. When you send the print job to the printer and it
does not respond, and there is no error message
on the PC:
A. Check your data stream for some of the basics.
Is your job framed as follows?
<ESC>A—DATA—<ESC>Z
B. Verify that you’ve included all required parame-
ters in the data stream.
C. Verify the following:
• You have not typed a “0” (zero) for an “O”
(letter) or vice-versa.
• You have not missed any <ESC> characters
where they’re needed.
• Make sure all printer command codes are
capital letters.
• Your protocol codes are set for Standard or
Non-Standard and your data stream is con-
sistent with these.
5. If you’ve checked all of the above and the printer still isn’t
printing, you may want to try a Receive Buffer Hex Dump to
determine what (if anything) the printer is receiving from your
computer. To print Hex Dumps see page 3-24, Configuration
and Operation.
The Centronics port is now listening for incoming data. Send
your print job. The printer will now print (only once) a Hexa-
decimal (Hex) Dump of everything it received from the host
computer. Each 2-digit hexadecimal character represents a
character the printer received. It may be tedious, but now
you can analyze and troubleshoot the data stream.
6. While checking the Hex Dump printout, look out for the
sequence 0D 0A, which is a combination of Carriage Return
and Line Feed characters. The command string should be
continuous, and you should not see CR or LF characters
between the Start Command (<ESC>A) and the Stop Com-
mand (<ESC>Z).
If you are using BASIC, it may be adding these characters
automatically as the line wraps. Adding a “width” statement
to your program can help to suppress these extra 0D 0A
characters by expanding the line length up to 255 characters.
See the beginning of the Programming Reference, under
Command Codes, for details on writing a program in BASIC.
If you are not programming in BASIC, check to see if you
have an equivalent statement in the language you’re using,
to suppress extra carriage returns and line feeds from your
data being sent out to the printer. The data stream should be
one complete line going to the printer.
Observations