wnn@DSUNX1.DSRD.ORNL.GOV (W. N. Naegeli) (01/31/89)
Has anyone else experienced problems with WordPerfect 5.0 and TOPS NetPrint? It takes an exceedingly long time to print out a document. Our setup is a PC-XT with 640 kB RAM, WordPerfect 5.0, Tops NetPrint, a LocalTalk PC card from Apple, PhoneNet, and a NEC SilentWriter LC-890. If we attach the SilentWriter to the parallel printer port of the PC but still use WordPerfects PostScript mode, and turn of NetPrint, printing is resonably fast. But when we redirect LPT1 with Netprint and set AppleTalk as the hardware interface on the SilentWriter, printing takes about three times as long. There does not seem to be anything wrong with the network, all tests are fine and printing from other programs or doing screendumps letting NetPrint convert to PostScript using Proprinter emulation accurs at acceptable speed. Since WP puts out PostScript, we turn of Proprinter emulation before entering WP of course. The dime delay seems in the handshaking between WP and NetPrint. It takes very long for WP to give the entire page or document to NetPrint. Once NetPrint beeps and starts to send the document out over AppleTalk, everything seems to be going at normal speed. If we go into printer control on WP to observe the printer status, it is apparant that even initializing takes longer with NetPrint at the receiving end, i.e. about 32 seconds, whereas initilizing takes only about 19 seconds when directly going out to the printer over the parallel interface. Each actual page also takes at least twice as long to "print" (as far as WP is concerned) to NetPrint. This XT has a 28ms hard disk, which is faster than a standard XT and it would appear to me that NetPrint should be able to put the datastream into the temporary diskfile faster than a printer can handle it, at least for multi-page documents. Does anyone have an idea what might be wrong? Or is this just the way it is? But why? Technical support people from both WordPerfect and TOPS have been nice, but they haven't really been able to give me a clue or an explanation, saying that if something is wrong, it must be the other company's fault. Wolfgang N. Naegeli Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 615-574-6143 wnn@dsunx1.dsrd.ornl.gov (128.219.96.46)