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Appendix A— Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting
Problem
The first label I print is fine, but the next one starts
printing further away from the top of the label form, then
sometimes skips a label, then prints a good label.
I send a label to the printer, and the label begins to print.
Before all of the label is printed, there is a feed to the next
label. This happens for two attempts before the printer
stops.
When I send a label to the printer, the label file gets
printed, and not the label itself.
My printer doesn't seem to respond when I send anything
to it.
There seems to be missing or garbled characters sent to
the printer.
166
Solution
Make sure that you only have one carriage return and line
feed (CR/LF) pair after the Print statement in your label.
If there is more than one CR/LF pair, the printer prints
the label then sees the extra CR/LF pairs as data to be
printed in Line Print mode. This advance causes the next
label to be registered incorrectly when a new label file is
sent.
Make sure that the label length specified in your
command line is shorter than the distance between your
eye-sense marks on the label stock. If you are asking to
print a 400-dot long label and the label stock eye-sense
marks are 300 dots apart, the printer sees an eye-sense
mark before the entire label has printed and assumes the
label stock was not at top of form. It then feeds to the
next top of form and tries again. After two tries, the
printer advances to the next top of form and stops.
If you are getting the label file printed instead of the label,
the syntax of the first line may be incorrect. Check that
the syntax is something like: ! 0 200 200 210 1 where the
210 is the label length and 1 is the quantity. If the printer
detects an invalid first line, the Command mode is not
entered. Instead, the printer acts as a generic line printer,
and the remaining lines are treated as raw text to be
printed.
Make sure that you have the same communications
parameters for both the printer and the device connected
to it. You can determine the printer's settings by turning
the printer off, then while holding the Feed button down,
turning the printer back on. It should respond by printing
a report, pause for about 3 seconds, then print a second
report. If you look through these reports, you find an
entry for the current baud rate setting.
Some systems may alter characters before they are sent to
the printer. The "\" character for example may be taken as
an escape for the following character. You can place the
printer in a Dump mode to see exactly what characters are
being received. In this mode, any character that comes
into the printer is printed in both its ASCII form and as a
hex value. To place the printer in Dump mode, turn the
printer off, hold down the Feed button, and turn the
printer on. When a report begins to print, release the Feed
button. After the first report, there is a pause then a
second report. At the end of this report, press the Feed
button to enter Communications Diagnostic (Dump)
mode. For help, see Chapter 1, "Programming
Introduction." If you are successful, you see the message
"Dump Mode Entered" on the label along with the COM
port settings. You can now send your data to the printer
and then examine the resulting label to determine if all
characters received are as expected.
EasyCoder PL-Series Printer Programmer's Reference Manual
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