melvin@cgdra.cgd.ucar.edu (Lee Melvin) (09/21/90)
I have a somewhat aggravating problem that has so far frustrated me to no end: Some of the landscape files created by dvips will jam our printers. Our systems are primarily Sun Sparcstations, with a 3/280 and a 4/280 as servers. We've got a few NCD xterminals thrown in for good measure. We have 6 Apple Laserwriter IINTX's connected to our machines via Appletalk and Sun's TOPS box and software. We also have 1 LW IINTX connected directly to a sparcstation. We're running SunOS 4.0.3 and TOPS 2.2. In all cases, the postscript produced by dvips will print just fine on our one LW which is direct connected. On all the TOPS printers, the job enters the queue, is shown as 'active' on a 'ready and printing' queue, and the 'in use' light on the printer blinks. And blinks. And blinks -- for at least 2 days. Someone suggested that I get ahold of some error-handling software for the printer, so I ended up with a file called 'ehandler.ps', which has absolutely no effect on the print job. Also, the problem only occurs on landscape files. The dvips 'tack-on' postscript header has a definition for '@landscape' and '@letter'. You can change 'landscape' for 'letter' in a problem file and it will print just fine. The postscript must be legitimate, though, as it will print on our one direct-connect. It seems rather likely then, that the problem is either in the Appletalk network, the TOPS box, or the TOPS software. Is it possible that one of these components could be interpreting part of the file, or losing the EOF for the print job? Any help or comments on what I could do next would be greatly appreciated, cause I'm stumped. I took one of the problematic files and whittled it down in the hopes of isolating the error ("I can jam that printer in... 256 characters!"). This is a copy of the result: %!PS-Adobe-2.0 200 dict begin [0 1 -1 0 0 0]concat 300 dup 72 300 div dup neg scale translate /Times-Roman findfont 15 scalefont setfont 502 113 moveto (R) 24 1464 3 -1 roll show moveto 2520 3 false [1 0 0 -1 0 -1]{8 string} imagemask showpage end The Times-Roman font was not part of the original file (there was a defined font in the file that I stripped out), but this one still causes a jam. Feel free to post or email me, as you like. Any and all help greatly appreciated. ~~~ melvin@ncar.ucar.edu,melvin@snoopy.colorado.edu,melvin@boulder.bitnet ~~~\ Lee Melvin | _Total Recall_ - Arnold Schwartzenegger, Sharon Stone, ILM, \| | CGD / NCAR | sci-fi, blood, guts & more - it just doesn't get better! |\ | ___ DISCLAIMER: I'm not a scientist, they just let me play with the Y-MP ___/