laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (07/23/84)
From: Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA> Does anyone have a good way of organizing a spooler for a QMS 1200? We don't want to reload fonts for each printout, since many of our printouts will use the same set. However if someone powers the printer down, it will (I assume) lose its fonts. I don't see any obvious way to know when this happens. -------
mac@tesla.UUCP (Michael Mc Namara) (07/26/84)
QMS provides a command, called qstate, which is the remembered state
of your laserprinter. Here (In /usr/spool/qpd/state) it records each
font as it down loads it.
qcat checks qstate to see if the desired font has been downloaded or
not, and will define a previously undefined font if need be.
If you turn off your laser printer, you lose.
Checking for ^Q's every ten seconds or so seems to be a cpu intensive
way of insuring the printer is on. Why not just educate your users not
to turn the switch off? Put a piece of tape on the switch, if need be.
Put the laser printer in a locked room.
I speak of the latest release of qtroff, dated May 14, 1984. laser-lovers@uw-beaver.UUCP (07/27/84)
From: furuta@uw-beaver.arpa (Richard Furuta)
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver
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Path: uw-beaver!cornell!tesla!mac
From: mac@tesla.UUCP (Michael Mc Namara)
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: Controlling a QMS
Message-ID: <407@tesla.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Jul-84 09:28:10 PDT
Article-I.D.: tesla.407
Posted: Thu Jul 26 09:28:10 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Jul-84 20:48:15 PDT
References: <1322@uw-beaver>
Organization: Cornell Electrical Eng.
Lines: 16
QMS provides a command, called qstate, which is the remembered state
of your laserprinter. Here (In /usr/spool/qpd/state) it records each
font as it down loads it.
qcat checks qstate to see if the desired font has been downloaded or
not, and will define a previously undefined font if need be.
If you turn off your laser printer, you lose.
Checking for ^Q's every ten seconds or so seems to be a cpu intensive
way of insuring the printer is on. Why not just educate your users not
to turn the switch off? Put a piece of tape on the switch, if need be.
Put the laser printer in a locked room.
I speak of the latest release of qtroff, dated May 14, 1984. laser-lovers@uw-beaver.UUCP (07/27/84)
From: Bob Brown <rlb@RIACS.ARPA> The business with the QMS is messier than all that. We have two programs that use the state file - qcat and a ditroff driver. No matter how careful we are about managing the state file and the printer, we still get occasional fubarlike output. Our procedure to clean up after errors is to (a) stop the queue, (b) kill the filter, (c) power down and up the printer (using the trick so that it skips the multiminute L1 wait), and (d) run reset-laser-printer which contains /usr/local/lib/qcat -p >/dev/laser /usr/local/lib/qcat -s >/dev/laser This usually does the trick, but since we use the 4.2BSD spooler, killing the filter or daemon isn't always so easy. QMS has told us that status queries will exist in a future release of their QUIC system, but if you use a parallel line, there's no return path. Bob Brown RIACS/NASA Ames ----------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (08/01/84)
From: allegra!cmcl2!rna!dan (Dan Ts'o) Hi, We are also looking into the problem of receiving status information from the QMS 1200 but don't have as yet a satisfactory solution. Please let us know of any you find. Currently, our qtroff command assumes it needs to load all fonts. The user can supply an option which directs qtroff to use the host-maintained font state. I put a scope on the QMS and found that it spits out an XON (^Q) every 10 seconds. This "feature" might be used to detect if the QMS was ever powered down or if the QMS is powered down, first being important for the font info and the second for the printer spooler to determine whether the printer is up at all. This was, of course, only the RS232 interface. Lets push QMS to providing better status information from the printer. Cheers, Dan Ts'o Dept. Neurobiology Rockefeller Univ. 1230 York Ave. NY, NY 10021 212-570-7671 ...cmcl2!rna!dan