clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) (02/12/91)
A while ago I posted a remark about a possible HP LJ III + HP Postscript Cartridge bug that occured with Psroff. (My psroff, not transcript's). This was with someone else running Psroff in this configuration. Thanks to Liam Quin at SoftQuad, we've figured out the problem. In the postscript, the following was seen: (user@site ..... \n) print And the printer was responding with: undefined command: user@site We commented out all of the prints and the job worked. Silly me, I thought it was something strange with the cartridge. No, it was really simple, the print spooler had echo turned on.... The printer sent the string back up the serial line, and since echo was on, the serial driver sent it back to the printer. Which promptly barfed. Even if you aren't working with psroff, this is something that you should check out, because an error in the postscript, or even simply a end-of-job timeout will punt something back up the serial line, and the echo may put the printer into a snit until the next timeout. If you're using a BSD-type print spooler, you should ensure that -echo is in the appropriate entry. On System V, you should ensure that the stty's at the beginning of the interfaces don't say "echo" (or better still, do say "-echo"). Thanks to Liam Quin of SoftQuad for mentioning this as a possiblity. I did send a copy of the postscript off to HP, but since they weren't working with the same spooler arrangement, they wouldn't have been able to find out what the problem was.