laser-lovers@uw-beaver (10/14/85)
From: William LeFebvre <phil@rice.arpa> We have two imagen 8/300 printers, both exclusively on the ethernet (that is, their only means of communication is the ethernet). We are quite happy with this. Our previous laser printer was connected to our VAX with a 9600 baud serial line. Downloading fonts was a real pain. We usually referred to it as the "9600 baud font downloading blues". The ethernet Imagen wins in two respects on this: the ethernet is much faster than 9600 baud, and you don't have to download a whole font to use it. Both of our printers have pagereversal on by default. It has been our experience that, if the printer cannot fit all the pages in memory to do the reversal, it will blow the reversal off and print out the pages in the order it got them. So, nothing is lost -- even with troff output. In other words, it doesn't hurt to turn on pagereversal. The 8/300 Page Printer User's Manual has this to say: pagereversal: ...For a single copy of a document, requesting pagereversal on with pagecollation off is the same as just requesting pagecollation on. pagecollation: ...If memory is insufficient to store the entire job, pagecollation is ignored. This is just another example of the Imagen software doing exactly what you would expect and want it to do. On the whole I have been very impressed (oh, please ignore the pun) with the Imagen printers. They (almost) always do what I would expect them to. Good job, Imagen! William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.arpa> or, for the daring: <phil@Rice.edu>
laser-lovers@cca.UUCP (10/17/85)
From: Clive Dawson <CC.Clive@R20.UTEXAS.EDU> I'd like to challenge some of Phil@Rice's message regarding Imagen 8/300's. Regarding page reversal, I always thought it would be a much better idea for the printer to reverse as many pages as it has room for, rather than ignoring pagereversal completely. In a 100 page job, I'd rather rearrange 2 or 3 sets of properly ordered pages rather than have to manually reverse all 100 pages. Another annoying feature regarding pagereversal/pagecollation is that collation seems to automatically imply reversal. If you know that the host software is going to send the document in last-page-first order, it would be nice if you could collate multiple copies WITHOUT causing page reversal to happen. Turning to the "it-would-be-nice-if" department, we could save A LOT of paper if we could suppress job header pages in an intelligent fashion. I don't want users to be able to be able to play with the JobHeader:OFF parameter at the time they queue the print job, even if they swear they're going to walk right over to the printer immediately. It would be useful, however, if a command could be issued AT the 8/300 console which would apply to the job in progress, telling it not to print the header page because I'm going to walk away and leave it on the tray anyway! Clive ------- -------
FURUTA@WASHINGTON.ARPA (10/22/85)
From: Geoffrey H. Cooper <imagen!geof@decwrl.DEC.COM> In Imagen printers, two job control language fields affect page reversal: pagecollation -- print collated copies in the <<right>> order for this engine, so that you get copies 1-2-3... 1-2-3..., ... going down from the top of the stack. pagereversal -- reverse the order in which pages come out on this job from its ``natural'' order. Pagecollation is a device independent feature. It exists specifically to let a host send a master down to one of a number of printers and get consistent reversal and collation. Pagereversal is device dependent, since the natural output order of the engine is device dependent. You can put them together. The combination means ``print collated sets in the reverse order from pagecollation'', i.e., the last page in the master is the top page in the stack. This is what you use when you want collated sets from a master generator that generates impress files in reverse order (because it was designed around an 8/300 or Imprint-10). In V2.2, the jobheader command has the following meaning: jobheader off -- never print job headers jobheader on -- always print job headers jobheader onerror -- only print job headers when there are error messages to print on them. You can set the default document control to disable jobheaders on jobs by default. Our interpretation of document defaults is that the document itself may override them, so the document can still request a job header using a "jobheader on" entry in the document header. Your suggestion about typing a command on the console saying "I got the job, so don't print the header" is a good one. I'll save it for when we spec out features for the next release. - Geof Cooper Imagen