Unwanted characters printing at the front of a document/page are usually a printer escape code that the printer cannot interpret. This will then cause the printer to print the printable portions of the command.
Most commonly this happens because a wrong printer driver is chosen during setup; a printer model driver is used which is 'close' to that printer model but does not support certain escape codes or the printer manufacturer is not adhering to the same driver standard that meditech is. (i.e. Meditech has an OPS HP Laserjet driver; while most manufacturers claim to fully support the hp laserjet driver standard that does not always turn out to be the case- depends on your definition of 'fully' I guess). Your comment of the problem going away if you change printers seems to support this. For example, we have found that a number of pathology reports print an extra blank page on a Ricoh laser while working fine on a Lexmark laser. What we found was that the Ricoh simply does not adhere to the meditech driver 100% - fixing it for the Ricoh on the meditech side then simply made the lexmarks stop working properly. It needed to be fixed at the Ricoh end but never was (lots of finger pointing). If you really want to know for sure then dust off those hex editors and do a hex dump of the print stream (most printers can do this). Look for where the M is and find out what the characters are in front of it. If they are an escape code then you can lookup in the printer manuals what it is trying to accomplish. Hope this helps. Gary Gevaert Senior Technical Analyst Niagara Health System - Shaver Site DataCentre Building 541 Glenridge Avenue St. Catharines, Ontario L2T 4C2 www.niagarahealth.on.ca Please Note New number ! 905-378-4647 Extension 44806 ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: May 4,2007 11:27 AM To: Deb Carpenter Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MEDITECH-L] Random M's Printing on PHA IV Labels Sorry, I don't have a solution, but, yes, we experienced the same thing with our dot matrix printer. If we were printing a single label, the M would print first. If we were printing multiple labels, the M would print only on the first label. This issue persisted for years, and neither Meditech nor IS could figure out where it was coming from. It only occurred on our Outpatient label printer, which was also used for printing Canned Text, but not on our workhorse Inpatient label printer. For outpatient labels, we had to "black-out" the M, or else our hospital would look like MUNION HOSPITAL. The issue was only resolved when we replaced the dot matrix printer with a thermal printer. Steven Dailey, RPh Pharmacist/Informatics Union Hospital Elkton, MD 21921 Note: This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender. "Deb Carpenter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: [email protected] 04/30/2007 05:35 PM To <[email protected]> cc Subject [MEDITECH-L] Random M's Printing on PHA IV Labels We have a label printer in Pharmacy that is printing random letter "M"'s on the top of some labels. We have tried 3 different printers, but still have the same problem. If we reprint the label, it generally prints correctly without the "M". The labels used to print fine, but a few months ago we started seeing the "M"'s. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how did you resolve it? 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