jacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (02/01/89)
I have a question about possible bugs with backgrounder/printmonitor in multifinder. The problem we encounter with our Laserwriter II NT and printing seems to be related to it. In printing longer documents (10 pages or more it seems that only a portion of the document will be printed, and the rest does not. One person had a 10 page document, and only 8 pages would print, he resubmitted the last pages several times still no printing. Then exiting the program print monitor asked if the rest of his print job was wanted, and then it printed. My problem occurs with real long documents. I have a 100+ page manuscript. I try to print the whole thing out, and will get 20 to 30 pages, then nothing. The light on the printer is still flashing, but after 5 minutes I get a message that I have a printer error, and asks if I want to terminate the job. The problem occurs with either Word or Wordperfect. In the first example when background printing was turned off the problem went away. I did not try this for the longer document, but suspect that the problem would go away also. My question is then, is this a known bug in backgrounder/printmonitor. If so I guess I will have to leave this part of multifinder turned off???? Any ideas or help would be appreciated. Russ Jacobson Illinois Geological Survey jacobson@uiucuxe jacobson%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu jacobson%uiucuxe@uiuc.csnet [ihnp4,pur-ee,convex]!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!uiucuxe!jacobson
steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) (02/04/89)
In article <46100271@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> jacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
#>
#>I have a question about possible bugs with backgrounder/printmonitor in
#>multifinder. The problem we encounter with our Laserwriter II NT and
#>printing seems to be related to it. In printing longer documents (10
#>pages or more it seems that only a portion of the document will be
#>printed, and the rest does not. One person had a 10 page document, and
#>only 8 pages would print, he resubmitted the last pages several times
#>still no printing. Then exiting the program print monitor asked if the rest
#>of his print job was wanted, and then it printed.
#>
#>My problem occurs with real long documents. I have a 100+ page manuscript.
#>I try to print the whole thing out, and will get 20 to 30 pages, then nothing.
#>The light on the printer is still flashing, but after 5 minutes I get a
#>message that I have a printer error, and asks if I want to terminate the job.
#>
#>The problem occurs with either Word or Wordperfect. In the first example
#>when background printing was turned off the problem went away. I did not
#>try this for the longer document, but suspect that the problem would go
#>away also.
#>
#>My question is then, is this a known bug in backgrounder/printmonitor. If so
#>I guess I will have to leave this part of multifinder turned off????
#>
#>Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
#>
#>Russ Jacobson
#>Illinois Geological Survey
#>jacobson@uiucuxe
#>jacobson%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu
#>jacobson%uiucuxe@uiuc.csnet
#>[ihnp4,pur-ee,convex]!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!uiucuxe!jacobson
You don't supply enough information to be sure but here are two
thoughts. First, when you print very large documents, the print
spool has to be stored temporarily on your hard disk (it has to
be stored there for short documents, too, but that's not the
point). Let's say the spool file is 15 megs and you only have 10
megs free on your hard disk. That happened to me once; I had to
restart and delete the spool file and break my document up into
smaller parts. When you do not print in the background,
presumably you do not generate such a large spool file and,
voila, no problem. You didn't say how much space there was on
your disk, though, so perhaps this isn't an explanation.
Second, you don't say from what program you are printing. I
mention this because PageMaker, for example, sometimes has
problems printing documents as short as 20 or 30 pages and
sometimes doesn't; I can't remember if I read this in the manual
or if somebody told me about it over the phone, but it has
happened to me more than once. In that instance, after a few
pages have printed, you get a
message about having lost contact with the printer (it's been a
while since its happened here so I could be off a bit). All you
can do is to keep resubmitting until everything prints. I'm not
sure, but I think this is a bug in the Aldus Driver, which is
unfortunately necessary to do some printing such as reversals.
On the other hand, the Aldus driver refuses to print in the
background (Aldus told me this was because Apple was so secretive
about releasing information about its system and drivers!) so
maybe this isn't your problem.
Steve Goldfieldjacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (02/06/89)
The program I use and have trouble with is Wordperfect, but a friend who uses my SE uses Word on it and has the same trouble. My hard drive has nearly 10 MEG free on it, and the document in question is about 130 K. The problem described in your reply with Aldus is exactly what happens to me with wordperfect. It will print 20 or so pages, then stop, while the laserprinter light still flashes, eventually giving me the same message that there is printer trouble. The fact that this occurs with Aldus (as mentioned in the above reply to my note) and also in WordPerfect and Word now has me convinced it is something about Apple's drivers that the developers indeed do not know about (since they are apparently secretive about them). Russ Jacobson jacobson@uiucuxe jacobson%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu jacobson%uiucuxe@uiuc.csnet [ihnp4,pur-ee,convex]uiucdcs!uiucuxc!uiucuxe!jacobson
casseres@Apple.COM (David Casseres) (02/08/89)
In article <46100274@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> jacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: >[description of printing problem deleted] > >The fact that this occurs with Aldus (as mentioned in the above reply to >my note) and also in WordPerfect and Word now has me convinced it is >something about Apple's drivers that the developers indeed do not know >about (since they are apparently secretive about them). Unfortunately I don't know the answer to the printing problem (perhaps someone else can help with it), but I must correct a misunderstanding. Apple doesn't tell people how to *write* printer drivers, or the internal workings of printer drivers; but Apple is not at all "secretive" about how to *use* printer drivers. Inside Mac, the tech notes, and the tech support people are fully informative about what will and will not work when an application uses the printing interface. David Casseres
davis@bdmrrr.bdm.com (Arthur Davis x4675) (02/08/89)
The Apple Background Laser spooler has been giving me fits as well. Most of my experience has been with Word, but it has happened to lots of people at work with a variety of Word processors. It seems to start out timing out on long files (sometimes as few as 10 pages or more). And once it gets started, I have had it complain about timing out on a 4 page file. My solution was to begin using the TOPS spooler instead, since we have TOPS on the net. The TOPS spooler is Think/Symantec's LaserSpeed repackaged. It has performed admirably without a single failure to my knowledge since we switched over. The TOPS 2.1 recent update has a version of LaserSpeed which supports the 5.2 Laser driver, so it is commercially available.