We are having a problem with PP and our Xerox Phaser printers. The printers each have 4 paper trays. When we spool a job out to print, the job will often (most times) pull the paper from only 1 or 2 trays ignoring the other trays. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which tray(s) the printer will ignore when printing any job. In addition, occasionally we will spool a job out and the printer will not even recognize the print command. Has anyone else experienced this problem? We are wondering if it is a setting or command. We have tried several drivers and the problem persists. This does not happen on any of the other printers we have except the phasers. It also does not happen if we print a word document. Any help will be appreciated.

Hi Barb,

How have you configured the tray calls? Are you specifying a tray for each page, and it's not picking some of them, or is it all set to "Auto-Detect"?

If it's all set to Auto-Detect, well, the tray calls will be handled in whatever way the printer decides to handle postscript-based tray calls. Since it's pure postscript, you may get a different behavior than printing from Word(which uses the windows driver), and each printer has their own postscript interpreters and result can vary from printer to printer. So we don't really have much control over this.

If you have set specific trays, and it's ignoring some of them, then it could be related to the PPD that you are using. Make sure you are using a PPD file made for your printer instead of the default PPD, as the default PPD might not contain the proper information on the trays and other features.

Regards,
Raphaël Lalonde Lefebvre

My It guy says we are set to auto-detect. When you say "...each printer has their own postscript interpreters and result can vary from printer to printer." Do you mean from one Phaser printer to another Phaser printer or from brand to brand like a Xerox to an HP? In addition, I have asked my IT guy to check what PPD file we are using.
Thanks, I hope we can pin-point the problem. It is terribly inefficient babysitting one or two trays constantly when printing jobs that often run in excess of 5,000 pages.

UPDATE: My IT guy went out to look for a less "universal" PPD, we tested several. One managed to pull from all four trays - once. After that the printers went back to picking and choosing which trays to pull the paper from. Trays 2 and 5 have been the most popular for the last few days, tho a job this morning wanted to pull from 3 (which is jamming and useless right now). Any other suggestions on curing this problem would be gratefully accepted.