Section 6: Troubleshooting
Page 6-2
XL400/410e Operator’s Manual
4. When you send the print job to the printer and it does not respond, and there is no error mes-
sage on the PC:
A. Check your data stream for some of the basics. Is your job framed as follows?
<ESC>A—DATA—<ESC>Z
B. Verify that you’ve included all required parameters in the data stream.
C. Verify the following:
• You have not typed a “0” (zero) for an “O” (letter) or vice-versa.
• You have not missed any <ESC> characters where they’re needed.
• Make sure all printer command codes are capital letters.
• Your protocol codes are set for Standard or Non-Standard and your data stream is
consistent with these.
5. If you’ve checked all of the above and the printer still isn’t printing, you may want to try a
Receive Buffer Hex Dump to determine what (if anything) the printer is receiving from your
computer.
To print test labels s
ee Section 3, page 17.
The Centronics port is now listening for incoming data. Send your print job. The printer will
now print (only once) a Hexadecimal (Hex) Dump of everything it received from the host com-
puter. Each 2-digit hexadecimal character represents a character the printer received. It may
be tedious, but now you can analyze and troubleshoot the data stream.
6. While checking the Hex Dump printout, if you notice 0D 0A (Carriage Return and Line Feed)
characters throughout. The command string should be continuous and nor CR or LF charac-
ters are allowed between the Start Command (<ESC>A) and the Stop Command (<ESC>Z).
If you are using BASIC, it may be adding these characters automatically as the line wraps.
Adding a “width” statement to your program can help to suppress these extra 0D 0A charac-
ters by expanding the line length up to 255 characters. See the beginning of the Program-
ming Reference, under Command Codes, for details on writing a program in BASIC.
If you are not programming in BASIC, check to see if you have an equivalent statement in the
language you’re using, to suppress extra carriage returns and line feeds from your data
being sent out to the printer. We want the data stream to be one complete line going to the
printer.