Printer Not Rendering Line Printer Font

[RCDirITbusSvcs]

I purchased 3 of the HP LaserJet M402n printers last August to use for an event.  The application from which we are printing sends a text file directly to the printer and formats the text in the "Line Printer" font, which is font #84 on this particular printer.  They worked fine last year, as far as I can recall.  However, this year when the print jobs come through, the font that is printing appears to be Courier 12pt.  It should be the Line Printer 12pt, which is how it's set.  All of the other printers that are connected to this system seem to work fine - no problems.  We can print to them from Windows directly using the Universal Print Driver and they produce documents from Word, Adobe, etc., with no problems.  There was a firmware upgrade released earlier this month, which I have applied, but didn't help this issue.  Has anyone else seen something like this?  Did I just pick a bad model printer, or is there some way to fix this? 

[John_Getzke]

If I am following this correctly then you are sending a non print language formatted document to the printer and asking the printer to format the job for you with its built in languages and fonts instead.  This is a risky decision for a critical application as it greatly reduces your ability to influence or troubleshoot font or language problems when they are encountered.  All you get is what is on the printer at the time.

This application you are printing from, it must be resting on a machine of some kind.  Does that machine not have a print driver installed on it that influences teh print behavior?  If so then maybe we can try switching around UPDs or model specific drivers to find one that behaves better for you.  Is it possible to influence the application to change the default font in any way and see if another one will perform better?

Another work around may be to have the printer print the document as an image instead of as a text file with fonts.  PDF documents and applications can do this in the printer settings.  Then the printer does not see a text document with fonts that needs to be translated to physical print. Instead the printer sees an image and should have less problems with it at the expense of a much larger print document in memory.  We do this in many legacy printing applicaton scenarios with great success.

[RCDirITbusSvcs]

I found out more about how these jobs are being submitted from a collague this morning.  Apparently the jobs are coming from a project called "ROC EasySpooler" - they are being sent through an HP Universal Print Driver and are being routed through our Windows print server, which also uses an HP UPD. 

As we talked about it today, we were wondering if perhaps the HP Universal Print Drivers that are on the ROC server and on the Windows Print Server were not the same version and could be conflicting somehow?  It's just strange that all of the other HP printers we have connected to this same system, work fine.  We've checked the settings and they  match on both the servers and the printers - it's like this one model of printer won't work.  We have 4 of them on campus - none of them appear to want to work with this type of print request. 

[Jim_Asman · Accepted solution]

The lineprinter font is a bitmap font ONLY available as a single size, 16.75 pitch, period. Any attempt to print it at a different pitch will result in you getting a different font. I would expect Courier as you surmised.

[RCDirITbusSvcs]

Thank you for this!  I finally got around to testing it and it worked perfectly.   Thank you, thank you!