ESC1111%DDAESA10.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu (N.Head) (07/15/87)
If you've put in the 'LOW_FOUR' patch to printer.c and the printer still doesn't work reliably then you may have the following problem (as I do with a C.ITOH 8510): The C.ITOH quite reliably fails to ack the last character sent if it is in the process of doing a carriage return at the time (but hasn't quite yet said so in the status word). As this is the last character sent before the 'busy' is asserted it is precisely this interrupt that should be triggering pr_char to try another burst of characters. The solution will be to write a printer driver that sends N chars, sleeps a little and then sends some more, avoiding the need for interrupts at all. It will be a while before I do it though so anyone who gets there first is welcome to mail me the source and save me the trouble. Nigel PS: Anyone done a printer daemon they're willing to share ??
75008378%VAX2.NIHED.IE@cunyvm.cuny.edu (09/22/88)
Dermot Tynan <dtynan@SULTRA.UUCP> writes: > I got Barry's printer driver (running 1.2) to run. I am late in sending out > invoices, and invoices == money, so there was a major effort underway early > this morning, to get everything up and running. It worked just fine, except > for a couple of things; tabs were all over the place. I haven't had a chance > to look at the driver yet, so it might even be my printer. I fixed the > problem by quickly editing the invoices and replacing all tabs with spaces. > In the future I will probably write a QnD (quick and dirty) program to convert > them, if one doesn't exist. When I reprinted the files, I could see no traces > of missing characters, or anything, so it is looking good! One other problem I > did find, however, is that if I turn off the printer, the system hangs until I > turn it back on. Again, I'll take a closer look tonight. Well it's nice to know someone got it working. There is *no* tab handling in the driver - if you want tab expansion (and newline expansion for that matter) shove your stuff thru lpr. If you're already doing that, there really is something fishy going on... I'm not sure what you mean by "the system hangs" - like *everything* freezes? Or just the driver? Does the driver print up any error messages? (it should if you try to print while the printer is off...). The error handling is poor all right (e.g. it might be nicer if you could go off line, and back on, without necessarily aborting an I/O request in the driver). I should have V1.3 within the next couple of weeks (thanks Richard, and Rick too), so I'll have a look at the driver again then maybe. PS: Dermot: No I havn't got mail from you, no I can't seem to get mail thru to you. I'll keep trying some more variations... Barry McMullin, NIHED, Dublin Ireland. <MCMULLINB@VAX2.NIHED.IE>