Kyocera Prescribe emulation

This emulation emulates most of the Prescribe commands from a Kyocera printer. The emulation can switch between ASCII, Prescribe and PCL, but not other PDL's like Proprinter, Epson, KPDL or PCL6. If your jobs are not 100% correct converted to PCL/PDF or printed on your PCL printer, then please send your captured data stream to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The emulation might stop once an unknown Prescribe sequence if found. It might be the case that the stethos support asks for the configuration pages of the printer who prints the pages in a correct way. Therefore we prepared a ready-to-print file which can be sent to the printer via LPR or Tcpsend which prints these pages we need.

ELP offers those emulation settings:  Configuration Tab - Rule assistant - check box Prescribe Emulation

Additional ini-File keys which are not selectable in the user interface

Additional information:

The emulation needs to be turned on using the key Prescribe in one of those rules: GLOBAL, Printer name, User Name, Port name or Driver Name (default is GLOBAL)

All ELP command keys for the Prescribe emulation start with PRE_... There are quite some more keys available, then the menu above provides. Most of them are only shown in the ini file editor, when the rule/section PRESCRIBE is marked. They are for example related to paper tray handling and print margins.

Any defined macro (MCRO command) is stored by ELP under the name of the arriving queue into the file system of ELP. The full file name is Prescribe_macro_<printername>_<macroname>. The destination folder is the Workpath folder which usually is the c:\ProgramData\WELP.
Like the font definitions above, they will be saved like in the printer's memory, and can be used by any following data stream.
If Prescribe calls a macro ELP checks:

1. Its memory if the macro is already loaded by the MCRO command or by earlier usage.
2. if a macro file exists in the working directory under the print queue name
3. if a macro file exists in the working directory without the print queue name. ELP does not generate those files. If all printers do use the same Prescribe macros then we recommend to generate them once and rename them by removing the queue name.

On start-up, ELP will first read the definitions in the ELP configuration file. But after that, the system looks for the content the file FRPOFILE.VAR or FRPOFILE_<printername>.VAR, which may have been set before, using Prescribes FRPO parameters. If you initialize the printer with FRPO parameters, your need to do that with every activated queue as well.

Technical information:

Most Prescribe Commands are supported, but not all FRPO parameters. here the supported ones:

The FRPO settings must set per Prescribe activated queue and obviously can be different in between each other.

Notes related to Prescribe commands:

The RES command does currently initialize the printer to the following settings: Default Tray with media type Plain, 1 copy, portrait, 6 lines per inch with Courier in Roman 8 symbol set and 300 dpi. After that certain FRPO Parameters are read. However, if the key PRE_INIT is provided those statements are used.

The CASS and PSRC commands are NOT selecting directly the paper trays. The usage of them is much more powerful. When Prescribe selects a tray, ELP opens the actual ini-file and checks the section [PRESCRIBE] for the keys: Pre_CASS1 to 4 or Pre_PSRC1 to 6 and 99. If the key is not defined, no selection change is performed. But if it is defined, the key values can be any PCL sequence, in most cases for selection paper media. The sequences are listed in the HP PJL technical reference Manual. Please note, that the <27> sign has to be entered in the command with \x1B.
Unfortunately there are definitively differences between Kyocera printer models. Some of them do set a cursor position some not. In any case, you may add a cursor positioning command Esc&f#a#V after the tray selection command. Finally the corresponding media type of any available paper tray can be set in the printers paper handling menu. You can also use the PCL5 sequence \x1B&l#H for tray selection, but then you need to know the number #.

The final paper tray selection flow is like this:
CASS / PSRC -> converted to a media type -> send to printer PCL interpreter -> he selects finally the correct tray from the printer defined media list.

The handling of the STPL command is similar. The link to the correct is done using the key Pre_staple# in the Prescribe section. Note as operands you my also use variables, which can be preset according to the printer model type.

Depending on the printer, you may set set in their menue the option wide printing on and off. We suggest to use always wide printing ON. Especially for landscape printing, it could be that an YMove value needs to be defined.

JEIDA / Flash data stream storing forms to the printers flash memory, are also processed and the files stored for every activated queue. This means, they need to be set (printed) minimum once for every activated queue.

Notes:

• Prescribe is a complex printer language. If the result is not as expected then let us know: Need help? How to get support! 
• there are other rule based solutions for fixing problems: Use SEARCH_... rules, but note: using in the rules data sream based PRE_XScale, PRE_YScale, PRE_XMove and PRE_YMove changes to the default setting in the rule Prescribe, they rule should hit in the first analyzed 2048 Bytes. You may extend that to 16k using the Max_ReadBuffer key in the rule GLOBAL.
• Unknown (not yet supported) Prescribe commands are ignored.
• The readable text size when printing barcodes might be slightly differen compared to the original. Some EAN and UPC bar codes with readable text might look different, according to the bar codes specification.
• Paper tray selection can also be done by any ELP_COMMAND.
• The command PRE_STOREMACROSTOFLASH=ON is only available for Ricoh IBS. It does redirect the working path for storing and reading Prescribe macros to the device RAM disk. This does avoid, that each job might write to the Flash component and destroy it after X thousand write cycles.
• If the data stream comes each time with all Prescribe macros included, then you may add the key PRE_DONTSTOREMACROS=ON to avoid to store each time the macros on the hard disk / flash.
• The AMCR command does store for each enabled queue the amount of overlay pages or if overlay is permanent enabled. As Kyocera, this works until the command is stopped or the device is turned off. But please note if you archive the data streams, the form is visible in the first enabling data stream, on all pages, but NOT on following data streams!

Related articles: Rule assistant   Add key to rule