laser-lovers@uw-beaver (06/17/85)
From: Gene Lege' <ots!gene@rice.arpa>
Does anyone have any experience with the QMS Lasergrafix 800 and
the QMS supplied QTROFF troff interface software on the 90x. I have
been trying to bring up this hardware/software combo and have run
into a problem that has me stumped.
I am driving the printer through a serial line (ITP). I have verified
that dumping large amounts of ASCII data to the port works without
a hitch. The problem rears its head when the QTROFF software (in
particular: qcat) tries to download a font to the printer. Qcat uses
a routine called "copy" wich simply "fread"s and "fwrite"s BUFSIZ byte
chunks from the font file to the serial line. The first call to fwrite
returns indicating some number < BUFSIZ bytes were actually written
and the errcode value indicates an "I/O error" (supposedly a hard IO
error.) All further calls to fwrite return 0.
I have verified that the software is doing the appropriate ioctl's on
the line to set the line discipline (4.2BSD universe) to the new tty
driver and sets LLITOUT in the local mode word. (LLITOUT turns off all
output processing, with the result that all 8 bits are passed out the
line to the printer.)
I also tried writing in smaller chunks (512; BUFSIZ == 2048), but it
didn't help; The return value of the first fwrite is simply a smaller
number that is still < the number of bytes requested.
Any ideas?
Gene Lege'
ots!gene@Rice.ARPA
...!{cbosgd,cornell,ihnp4!ut-sally}!rice!ots!gene
PS. If you see this on laser-lovers please reply directly to me
since I am not on that list.