smith%eri.DECnet@MGHCCC.HARVARD.EDU.UUCP (03/04/87)
A couple of people has asked about VMS printer spoolers for the Apple LaserWriter. One possibility is a fairly new commercial product called PacerPrint. I think they want $1000 for it. We have not purchased it yet ourselves but I think we will. They demonstrated it for me in Westboro and it seemed to work. I tried pulling out the paper tray while it was printing and an appropriate message was sent to the operator's console; when the tray was reinserted, printing continued. I don't have the blurb with me but it had reasonable ways of printing a) text files (to be printed as plain text, all in a single, but selectable font), b) PostScript files, and c) Tektronix 4014 files. If you've tried, you already know that it's trivial to set up a LaserWriter for spooling so that it ALMOST works, and hard to set it up so that it REALLY works. The big problem is that you have to process error and status messages coming back from the printer. Generally speaking, I was impressed with Pacer's technical depth and quite inclined to believe their stuff works. Personally, this is a wheel that I think would cost us more than $1000 to reinvent. Of course, now that Digital has announced ScriptWriter, you could also just sit back and assume that eventually they'll have to work this out themselves and put it into VMS. I wonder if they can possibly devise a solution that will work with the ScriptWriter and fail with the LaserWriter? :-) Pacer Software, corporate/administrative/sales 7911 Herschel Ave Suite 402 La Jolla, CA 92037 619 454-0565 Pacer Software (R&D) 1900 West Park Drive Westboro, MA 02581 617-898-3300 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel P. B. Smith ARPA: smith%eri.decnet@mghccc.harvard.edu Eye Research Institute CompuServe: 74706,661 20 Staniford Street Telephone (voice): 617 742-3140 Boston, MA 02114 -------------------------------------------------------------------- "For my part, I could easily do without the post-office.... To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage".--Thoreau ------