deke@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu (12/22/88)
This is a followup to my recent article asking about setting the
'appletalktype' field on a LaserWriter. Many people wrote and asked
me to summarize my findings.
My motivation was to hide actual LaserWriters from the Mac 'chooser'
so that everyone would see the "spoolers" but nothing else. This helps
to avoid the situation where users reset the LaserWriter with 'old' version
of LaserPrep (which breaks lots of things when you are depending on
a particular level of LaserPrep). My department has about 200 users of
Macs and UNIX machines... its just not possible to control the versions
of LaserPrep hanging around (though I wish it were).
A local postscript hacker here in my own department helped me find
a minor bug in my PostScript program. I now can change the appletalktype
on my LaserWriters to 'LaserPrinter' with the following:
%!
serverdict begin 0 exitserver
statusdict begin
statusdict /appletalktype (LaserPrinter) put
end
As I feared, and as others pointed out, this breaks things. The spooler
dies on the UNIX end, probably because nbpd(8) won't keep track of the
odd appletalktype (that's my uneducated guess).
I believe that a potential solution could be to allow for the spoolers
and the nbpd to recognize multiple or alternate appletalktypes either
through a configuration file, or even hardcoded but documented.
I invite comments on this idea. I would like to hear both from Kinetics,
and other users. Perhaps there are more obvious workarounds to the
problem I have described.
^Deke Kassabian, deke@ee.rochester.edu or ur-valhalla!deke
Univ of Rochester, Dept of EE, Rochester, NY 14627 (+1 716-275-3106)