Send dumthe data to printer to wake it up

cupsprinting

I have a Dell B1260dn Mono Laser Printer connected to cups.
It is used for receipts.

Especially the first page in the morning takes almost a minute to print, because the printer have to warm up, it seems.

Also during the day, the startup time varies depending on how long since the last print.

I'd like to send an "Hey printer, wake up, be ready to print" command.

I have tried this:

require_once ('printipp/CupsPrintIPP.php');
$ipp = new PrintIPP();
$ipp->setHost("cupshost");
$ipp->setPort(613);
$ipp->setPrinterURI("/printers/printer2");
$ipp->setLog("/tmp/phpIPP", 'file', 3);
$ipp->setData(" ");
$ipp->printJob();

But that sends an empty page.

I've tried

$ipp->setData("");

But then nothing happens; there is not a job in the cups log.

Best Answer

I've not had to deal with this problem, but here are some things I would suggest looking into:

What is the actual data your script sends to the printer? How about a file with a single null character. Does that still print an empty page?

Look in the manual and see if you can change the settings for the "sleep" state of the printer. Maybe this printer supports a way to use telnet to log into it to change states of some type.

See if creating raw PostScript that sets up the printer to print something, but doesn't actually generate output. Like loading in some fonts, so it goes through the motion to do everything but actually doesn't print output. This might cause the printer to "wake up".

I do recall reading in a printer manual somewhere, where the printer had the option to set a time for it to wake up so there wasn't a delay in printing. I'm not saying this printer has this feature but it might.

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