another problem on 386i w/ laserwriter II
Evan Bauman x8937
bauman at shell.UUCP
Wed Jan 25 15:12:44 AEST 1989
Here's one for the net that's baffling a bunch of us.
I've got a 386i/250 with 4.0 and an Apple Laserwriter II NT. I do NOT
have Transcript since most of what I use outputs postscript anyway. When
I bought the system, I thought I'd just be able to dump everything to lpr
without any filters. After all, it used to work on my old 3/50 with SunOS
3.5!! (snickering permitted)
The Laserwriter is connected to ttya with an off-the-shelf null-modem
cable.
Here's the entry in /etc/printcap. We don't use ypprintcap.
lp|postscript|apple:\
:lp=/dev/ttya:br#9600:\
:lf=/usr/spool/lpd/lpd-errs:sd=/usr/spool/lpd:\
:rw:fc#0000374:fs#0000003:xc#0:xs#0040040:mx#0:sf:sb:
You'll notice that this is pretty much what Sun includes with SunOS 4.0 -
I've just stripped out the filter entries.
I had some Framemaker output (actually the manual for Tooltool), so after
I set everything up, I lpr'er the docs. The printer light blinked for a
while, but nothing ever came out of the printer. So I RTFM'ed in the
section on installing printers in the sysadmin guide.
(stty 9600; cat <frame doc>) > /dev/ttya
Lo and behold, out came the Tooltool documentation!
A problem with /etc/printcap?? Not necessarily...
I also use Lotus Manuscript in the DOS window on the 386i. This has a
postscript driver built in. About 75% of the time, when I print from
Manuscript, it works. The rest of the time, the printer just blinks. So
I compared the postscript output from Manuscript with the Frame output.
Framemaker starts with:
%!
%%Pages: (atend)
%%DocumentFonts: (atend)
%%EndComments
%
% Frame Maker PostScript Prolog 1.11, for use with Maker 1.11
% Copyright (c) 1986,87 by Frame Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
%
Manuscript starts with:
^D%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%DocumentFonts: (atend)
%%Title: M:\\MSDATA\\AICHE.DOC
%%Creator: Lotus Manuscript
and ends with:
%%Pages: 1
%%DocumentFonts:
%%+ Times-Roman
%%+ Times-Italic
%%EOF
^D
I've heard before that the CTRL-D's in postscript files produced by PC
software will cause problems. Only here, they seem to help!! I've
contacted Adobe who claimed that the CTRL-D's are just EOF markers and
really shouldn't be there. They also claimed that the tty driver in 4.0
was buggy and might be choking on the CTRL-D's. As always - fixed in
4.0.1. So my question is this - can I/should I modify printcap somehow to
account for this CTRL-D discrepency? Are these characters confusing my
laserwriter and/or lpr?? Or should I just ante up the $3K to Adobe for a
site license for Transcript (something we'll probably need anyway!)
Thanks in advance.
Evan Bauman
Shell Development Co.
Westhollow Research Center
bauman at shell.uucp
bauman%shell.uucp at sun.com
713-493-8937 (call collect if you have a solution!)
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