7.4

How you create and insert a trigger is operating system dependent. There are four common techniques to insert a trigger man-
ually:
1. Manually concatenating two files
With this technique, you add a trigger by concatenating two files where the first contains the trigger and the second con-
tains the input data. You send the concatenated file to the printer using the DOS Copy command or the file transfer pro-
tocol (FTP).
2. Setting up the print server to automatically insert triggers
This technique works with a print server running either Novell or Windows NT. You create a print queue or print device
for each document installed in the printer, and associate the appropriate trigger for the document with the queue you
set up for it. All queues point to the same physical printer. When you send a job to that queue, the server automatically
inserts the trigger associated with that queue before it forwards the printer job to the printer.
3. Setting up the host to automatically insert triggers
This is the same technique as setting up the print server to automatically insert triggers. The only difference here is that
you set up the queues on the host on which the input data resides. The host inserts the trigger ahead of the spool file
when it sends the print job to the printer. This technique does not work with all hosts.
4. Including the trigger in application output
With this technique, you modify the output of the application that generates the print file so that it adds a trigger for the
appropriate document. It is important to understand that this hampers your ability to print these jobs using other
printers since two additional lines are added to the print file.
Printer-Specific Control Characters
You can precede a trigger with printer-specific control characters. The most common reason to do so is to ensure the printer
receives the job you send as a new job.
A printer expects each job that it handles to end with a special character that tells the printer it has reached the end of the input
data. Until the printer receives this special character, it continues to process all input it receives as part of that job. If there is
no input, the printer waits for a defined period of time, then times out and proceeds to the next job. If a new job arrives during
the period of time the printer is waiting for input, the printer does not recognize it as a new job; rather it processes it as input
for the current job.
It is thus common practice to include an end of job character at the beginning of the trigger to ensure that the printer rec-
ognizes your job as a new print job. For certain printers, <CTRL D> or ASCII 04 is a valid end of job character, while more
recent printers require a Printer Job Language (PJL) sequence such as <ESC>%-12345X<CR><LF>.
As an example, the following trigger includes <CTRL D> as an end of job character:
<CRTL-D>%!PS-Adobe <CR><LF>
run INVOICE <CR><LF>
Trigger Syntax
What is the syntax of a trigger?
In all syntax descriptions in this section, italics denote a variable, square brackets indicate the element is optional, <CR>
denotes a carriage return and <LF> denotes a line feed.
The general syntax for the first line of the trigger is the same for all triggers.
[ printer-specific_commands ] %!PS-Adobe <CR><LF>
Document Output and Preview
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