A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Printing FAQ

How do I stop extra form feeds that spit out blank pages?

The concept here is the same as for getting rid of banners and trailers, but the scripts are even less standardized. The best place to look is in the section that (usually) starts with:

for file in $files

Following that maybe a line that does:

echo "\f"

or perhaps:

echo "\014"

or (less likely):

echo "^L"

and sometimes something obvious like:

echo "$formfeed"

Your job is to stop that formfeed from echoing. Some of the more complex scripts even have a whole separate formfeed program that they call. Whatever it is, if it's controlled by a variable set earlier in the script (most scripts are this way, including the Laserjet scripts), you should change that variable.

Remember that HP JetDirect printers have the real script in model.orig (see the first section of this article) and that you need to modify the models if the change is to be safely permanent.

If you are using Unixware, you might find Unixware HP JetDirect Printing by Jason Dale helpful.

Examples: the "dumb" and "hp" models have this code around line 100:

        for file in $files
        do
                0<${file} eval ${FILTER} 2>&1
                echo "\014\c"
        done
 

You'd need to remove the "echo "\014\c" line, or comment it out:

        
              # echo "\014\c"
        
 

There's another "echo" a few lines above; this is the one that spits out before your print job.

However, in the "standard" model, you'll find this around line 289:

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 nobanner="no"
 nofilebreak="no"
 

Just as you would change "nobanner" to "yes" to stop banners, you change "nofilebreak" to "yes" to prevent extra blank pages. Hans Fuller (hans@fullermetric.com) reminds me that if an HP script isn't already doing an echo "\033E\c" , you should replace the "\f\c" with that to reset the printer.

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