[comp.protocols.appletalk] lwsrv stripping meta characters

roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (05/20/89)

	After many many happy months of running lwsrv to let our Macs get
at LaserWriters plugged into an RS-232 port on a Sun, we've discovered a
small problem.  Lwsrv seems to strip the high bit from every character.
People have reported that if they print a document on the lwsvriced (have I
take verbification too far with that one?) printer, all their degree signs
get turned into zeros.  Presumably, a degree sign is just a meta-0 in the
font they are using.  Is there any good reason why lwsrv does this?  Is
there any easy way to turn it off?
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"

RSILVERMAN@EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU (Richard Silverman) (05/22/89)

Roy,
	I doubt lwsrv is mangling your data; it seems more likely that the
port driver on the Sun is set to 7 bits instead of 8.  Have you checked this?

                                                Richard Silverman

arpa:	rsilverman@eagle.wesleyan.edu           Computing Center
bitnet:	rsilverman@wesleyan                     Wesleyan University
CIS:	[72727,453]                             Middletown, CT 06457

dan@osiris.sics.se (Dan Sahlin) (05/23/89)

In article <3776@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>Lwsrv seems to strip the high bit from every character.
>People have reported that if they print a document on the lwsvriced (have I
>take verbification too far with that one?) printer, all their degree signs
>get turned into zeros.

You should run lwsrv with the switch "-T quote8bit" so that characters
having their eighth bit set are converted into "\octalnumber".

However, there is a slight problem with that solution:  PostScript only
recognizes \octalnumber in strings, but the conversion is done for
(almost) all characters, even in names.  I noticed the problem when I
tried to print using an Arabic downloadable font which had a very strange
name.  My solution was simply to enable the \-conversion only inside
strings.  It works fine.

I sent the fix to Charlie C.  Kim, but it is unclear whether it will be
included in later versions of lwsrv.  If you have a similar problem, I can
send you the diffs.

	/Dan Sahlin, SICS

email: dan@sics.se