Buying a New Printer

 

Don’t Be Disappointed!

 

When buying a new printer you will want to ensure this printer will work with your system so a little research is prudent.

 

Find the make of printer your thinking about buying from the link below.

 

Support for Various ASCII Printers

 

Once you are on the page for the Make find the model in the table lower down on that page.

 

 

 

 

 

Take this HP for example. Notice the "Y" under Host-Based.

 

Chances are you will not get this printer to function properly with your system.

 

Here is what IBM has to say:

 

The Host-Based column (formerly called the Windows Only column) shows if a specific printer is a host-based printer. The term Windows Only printer means that the printer was designed to be used only on a PC running a version of Microsoft Windows and was also generally designed to be used in a home or small office environment rather than in a networking environment. The term host-based printer expands this to refer to any printer that relies on the processing power of the host computer to generate printable pages.

 

Because they rely on the processing power of the host computer, host-based printers do not need a powerful processor of their own and, therefore, they tend to be less expensive than conventional printers. However, because they share the computer's processor, they might be slow and might slow down other tasks running on the computer. Host-based printers typically use a proprietary printer data stream rather than an industry-standard printer data stream.

 

Because they use a proprietary printer data stream, they do not work with Host Print Transform (HPT) or a PC5250 Printer Definition Table (PDT) file. Because they will not work with HPT, they also will not work to print *AFPDS spooled files through the AFPDS-to-ASCII Transform code within HPT. The only way to get a host-based printer to print OS/400 or i5/OS spooled files is to attached it to a host computer and then use printer emulation software, such as a PC5250 printer session, to print the OS/400 or i5/OS spooled file through the host-based printer driver.

 

When all is said and done there is a good possibility that the printer will not work well so should be avoided.

 

Additionally, if you need to configure this new printer as a print device PJL will need to be Yes.

Note: A print device will allow you to have form change notification and print page range support.

 

Here is an example of an HP printer that should work well with the iSeries system whichever way it’s set up.

 

 

 

 

 

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