Where Can One Find A List Of Supported Printers For E-Business Suite

Where can I find a list of supported printers for E-Business Suite (EBS)?

A list of supported printers does not exist. Printing devices have a default printer control language and often can emulate the languages of major printer manufactures such as Hewlett-Packard’s PCL language.

The Hewlett-Packard PCL language and the Adobe’s Postscript language has become the pseudo-standard for many printer makers. Oracle has populated EBS with working driver examples and tools in response to this emerging technology.

These generic or plain drivers are working examples intended for the printer make or model stated in the driver’s name and description. They may or may not optimally work with other printers. Oracle does not provide additional deliverable examples; therefore, outside of this set, a custom printer driver needs to be defined.

Populate the Initialization field of your custom Apps driver with the control (^) and escape (/e) characters supported by your printer. These control and escape commands do not have to be PCL; however, the printer must recognize and interpret them as a valid command to its default language. You will need to reference your printer’s manual or contact the vendor for information on how to initialize the printer.

The Initialization field can also be populated with octal commands–please see the Printing chapter within the Oracle Applications System Administrator’s Guide for information on how to use octal commands within an Apps driver.

In short, EBS provides a blank canvas–the Initialization field of your custom Apps driver–so that you can initialize / control any printer on the market that will accept an initialization string embedded into the report or the output file being printed.

Additionally, some printer types are easier to setup within EBS than other printers. The quickest setup can be accomplished with a printer that is Postscript ready and with the Oracle Pasta utility.

If the EBS implementation includes printing reports in the PDF format, a printer that supports a raw PDF file is also desirable; otherwise, a custom print style and drive will be needed to convert a PDF file to Postscript–most printers cannot handle a raw PDF file.

Very few newly manufactured printers are Unicode compliant, but such an option will be helpful in a multi-language configuration. The alternative is to use the Pasta tool and Unicode compliant fonts, which is required for UTF8 / AL32UTF8 character set environments.

Lastly, a simple PCL ready printer is the most common feature for printing seeded EBS reports, which are text based.

The most time consuming printers are impact dot matrix printers and line printers with non-standard printer languages. In such a case, the printer can still be used with EBS, but the implementer will need to learn the printer’s programming language and create a custom controlling initialization string for the Apps driver and for each needed layout (Portrait, Landscape, Landwide, etc).

Reference : Doc ID 353071.1

Thanks Yogesh