11i-R12 How To Setup Pasta Quickly and Effectively (Doc ID 356501.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 11, 2023

Applies to:

Goal

How to quickly and effectively setup an E-Business Suite (EBS) printer using the Pasta utility in order to print standard Oracle seeded reports in the English language.

Presently, most printers do not fully support the Unicode (UTF8) character set; therefore, it is essential to use Pasta to convert the output file to a format or character set that most printers do fully support. The main or common problem is poor interpretation of extended characters such as accent marks, Euro symbol, or umlauts.

Note 1: The printing chapter of Oracle Applications System Administrator's Guide states, "In order to print reports with the UTF8 character set, you must configure PASTA".

If a printer does not support the Postscript language, a custom pasta_xxx.cfg configuration file will need to be created, see
<Note 365111.1> "How to Setup Pasta for PCL Based Printers" and
<Note 739186.1> "How to Setup Pasta for Epson Esc/P Printers ".

The Pasta User's Guide provides all the needed details; also,
<Note 189708.1> "Oracle Reports 6i Setup Guide for Oracle Applications 11i" and
<Note 240864.1> "Activating and Configuring IX Library" are indispensable when performing more complex printing configurations.

On EBS instances with several different printers, a minimum of three separate configurations of Pasta may be required: Postscript Ready printers, PCL Ready printers (non-Postscript), and Dot Matrix Impact printers (non-Postscript & non-PCL). Each group of printers will need its own Pasta configuration file and a separate set of printer drivers. Printers are devices and very seldom can all devices be driven with a single driver or configuration file. Optionally, another set of Pasta configuration files and drivers will be needed to print reports in the PDF format—see
<Note 333504.1> "How To Print Concurrent Requests in PDF Format"

These concepts and setup steps are also applicable to EBS Release 12..x.

Solution

My Oracle Support provides customers with access to over a million knowledge articles and a vibrant support community of peers and Oracle experts.