ignatz@aicchi.UUCP (Ihnat) (03/01/85)
. Hello, folks. I'm going to do what I should have a week ago, and see if I'm reinventing the wheel. Our site is running a Plexus P/40, using Plexus' port of Unix 3.0 (binary license). Recently, I got John Collins' spooler package and fired it up; really, a very nice effort. HOWEVER...the parallel port on the Plexus is a nice, dumb port--whatever is sent there, goes out (NO canonical interpretation whatsoever); and the Dataproducts M200 hanging off the port is a nice, dumb dot matrix--it knows enough to reverse print its buffer, and that's it. Including no recognition of BS (^h) or HT (^I). The line printer daemon from Plexus is the standard one, with no control over running jobs--but it DOES have, apparently, a quite efficient algorithm to handle embedded backspaces. I've already written a filter to preprocess files, and it's reasonably efficient on strings of backspaces/characters (i.e., AAAA^H^H^H^HAAAA^H^H^H^HAAAA), but chokes (efficiency-wise) on nroff-type emboldened strings (i.e., A^HA^HA^HA^H). While I'm at trying to optimize this critter, I'd just as well ask: does anyone out there have a routine to handle this type of idiocy? Specifically, one that I could use; in the end result, this will become a part of JMC's spooler package as a printer type-description. Please either mail to me, or call (collect, if need be). Thanks, Dave Ihnat Analysts International Corporation (312) 882-4673 ihnp4!aicchi!ignatz -- Dave Ihnat Analysts International Corporation (312) 882-4673 ihnp4!aicchi!ignatz