[comp.protocols.appletalk] Has anyone altered papif to conditionally download laserpreps?

jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) (05/17/91)

I don't really want to go into the why (it is to do with accouting a logs),
but we want to set up a scheme where some users spool from macs to a lwsrv
server, which in turn passes data to a lpr process and then to papif - this
will pass stuff to the actual laser. We haven't done this - we currently run
with lwsrv spooling to an apollo prf queue - but we forsee a few problems with
the fact that lwsrv will always add the LaserPrep file in as the data passes:
	- It is inefficient, both the data space and download time -
	especially if some macs can access the laserwriter directly (which
	will be the case).
	- More importantly, our lpd processes cannot cope with lines longer
	than 132 characters, and the v70 LaserPrep (at least) contains some
	lines much longer than this.

Apart from recompiling lpr/lpd (which has not proved successful so far -
we are using Apollo OS10.1 systems), the best outline scheme for this was
for the lwsrv to leave the "Include Proc Set" line in - although to still
download any unknown LaserPreps, and for papif to be responsible for
downloading - after estabilishing it is not already in the laser. 

Before we set out to do this, I wondered if anyone already had, or
alternatively knew why it might be a bad idea. Alternatively, has anyone tried
the same thing for fonts - for which similar arguments apply?

Thanks in advance.

John Forrest
Dept of Computation
UMIST