How to get UNIX system to Select HPC on E87650dn

[InveraSteve]

We have an IBM AIX server that does printing to various HP Laser printers. There is no driver for the MFP series printers but it works very well using an HP4000 or HP8000 driver for what we need to do, which is just printing PCL print jobs. No graphics. No colors.

Our problem is the following: The drivers available to us allow us to select Multipurpose Tray, Tray 2, Tray 3, and High-Capacity Tray. But no matter which option we select, the printer will only print out of Tray 2 (LEGAL paper) on the E87650, or it asks us to confirm the tray we want to use and the users have to confirm each job to go to the HPC that has LETTER size paper.

SETTINGS ON PRINTER

Is there any way to tell the printer that we always want to print by default from the High Capacity Tray? I checked the menus and it seems we are running HP FutureSmart4, but we only have an option in Paper Tray for Automatically Select or Manual Feed. Should I be looking at a different section? I'd like to make the default to be LETTER from HPC and optional override for LEGAL from Tray 2.

SETTINGS IN O/S

The other option is if I can determine the appropriate tray number to supply to the printer driver in AIX, that might work too. But unlike Windows, there is not much control at the printer level. You must set up a "virtual printer" and the AIX driver has an option for "INPUT PAPER SOURCE:" that is currently set to "1" (which comes out of Tray 2) on the MFP. Has anyone had experience with the PJL printer specs to know which tray number represents the High Capacity Tray?

Thanks in advance

Steve N.

[InveraSteve · Accepted solution]

After fiddling around with some of the settings in the FutureSmart 4 Menus, it turns out that to get the UNIX/AIX jobs to hit the right tray, all that was required was to change a setting in the Manage Trays section. In General Tray Settings, we changed the  "Use Requested Tray" setting from "As Requested" to "When Available" instead. Then made sure that each tray was listed with the correct size paper (LETTER or LEGAL instead of ANY SIZE), and the printer started printing to the correct high capacity tray that we were hoping to start using.

Leaving the message posted and providing a solution we found, in case it helps someone else.