When I'm printing 40-col receipts with greater than 50 items, after about the 51st item the printer 'falters' - prints a few more lines of skewed and garbled data and aborts.
The setup: Browser based application has an activex object which writes to the serial port. The cash-drawer and receipt printer (ithaca 50) are connected through what seems to be a serial-parallel converting cable. On the parallel port end only the pins 2, 3, and 7 are present.
My guess was the printer buffer (which can go upto 2k) is not being cleared and hence the misaligned and garbled printing. I tried to reduce the number of bytes that i write to the serial port at a time - went as low as 256 bytes, and still no success in rectifying this problem.
Also, from what i've found on the web so far, looks like the pins for RTS, CTS are not available in our setup and so the flow control options wouldn't work either.
I apologize if I may not sound very coherent but my knowledge of the hardware-software interaction is quite limited. Also, if this question is not suited for this forum, I'd appreciate any suggestions as to where it could go.
I will be happy to answer any questions on the situation and setup to help solve this problem.
Thanks in advance.