Shared printer separator page for Windows 2000 and Windows XP

Admin Tip #22: Shared printer separator page for Windows 2000 and Windows XP

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If you are in a SOHO or company environment with shared printers, users may have trouble separating their print jobs if several of them print in a row. The standard solution is to use separator pages for shared printers. Windows 2000 and Windows XP includes 4 pre-defined separator pages in the winnt\system32 directory:

pcl.sep
Changes the printer to PCL mode and prints the separator page
pscript.sep
Changes the printer to PostScript mode but does not print a separator page
sysprint.sep
Changes the printer to PostScript mode and prints a separator page
sysprtj.sep
variant of sysprint.sep but uses Japanese fonts if available

You implement a separator page by

Right-clicking the shared printer you want to add a separator page to
Click Properties
On the Advanced tab, click the "Separator Page" button
Browse to or enter the name of the separator page file

If you want to modify a .sep control file, the first line must be a single character which defines the delimiter character (any character can be the delimiter). Follows is pcl.sep :

\
\H1B\L%-12345X@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE=PCL
\H1B\L&l1T\0
\M\B\S\N\U
\U\LJob : \I
\U\LDate: \D
\U\LTime: \T
\E

The codes are (continuing to use \ as delimiter):
\N : prints name of person submitting print job
\I : prints job number
\D : prints date (in format defined by Regional option of Control Panel)
\T : prints time (in format defined by Regional option of Control Panel)
\L : prints chars between code and next delimiter
\Ffqfn : prints contents of file specified by fqfn
\Hnn : prints printer specific control code where nn is in hex, \H1B is HP esc char
\Wnn : sets max width of separator page
\B\S : prints single-width block chars
\B\M : prints double-width block chars
\U : turns of block-char printing
\E : ejects current page
\n : skips n lines. Legal values are 0-9

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