twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) (03/13/91)
We've been having funny problems with our Laserjets (from Laserjet IIs to Laserjet III) all these years and I think we've finally found what is wrong. We have a lab of computers and every once in awhile, the Laserjet would stop printing graphics (regardless of program). It would either come out with a blank sheet or a 21 ERROR. We've tried rebooting (computer & printer) all sorts of things. So what we've adapted to doing is label that printer as text printer only until the graphics comes back. This has been happening on all Laserjets so we know it's not a problem with one printer. So finally, one guy saw a pattern. And after many tests, we found the problem. If someone sets a landscape font on the Laserjets panel, or sets orientation=L on Laserjet III, the graphics no work. And since Lotus 123 is used extensively here, printing of worksheet in landscape mode is a common thing. Then when someone sets thing back to portrait on the printer side, things work again. We've tested this on all our Laserjets and the same thing happens (some have garbage printout instead of blank sheet or 21 ERROR though). So I think we've found a bug in the way Laserjet does things. I can't see why this won't work. And I can't understand why it hasn't been detected/fixed by Laserjet III. Can others please confirm this bug? On Laserjet II, choose a landscape font on panel (something like I12 would do), then print graphics with your favorite graphics program (not word processor which somehow works!) On Laserjet III, choose orientation=L, then print graphics using your favorite graphics program (again not word processor). Then we can decide to flame HP or not. ;) Thomas.
tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) (03/13/91)
In article <1991Mar12.201750.28016@unixg.ubc.ca>, twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) writes: |> If someone sets a landscape font on the Laserjets panel, or sets |> orientation=L on Laserjet III, the graphics no work. And since Lotus |> 123 is used extensively here, printing of worksheet in landscape mode |> is a common thing. Then when someone sets thing back to portrait on |> the printer side, things work again. We've tested this on all our |> Laserjets and the same thing happens (some have garbage printout |> instead of blank sheet or 21 ERROR though). So I think we've found |> a bug in the way Laserjet does things. I can't see why this won't |> work. And I can't understand why it hasn't been detected/fixed by |> Laserjet III. Can others please confirm this bug? Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? The problem is that the LaserJet people put a lot of effort in allowing users to set defaults to be whatever they want, instead of always requiring drivers (and applications) to properly configure the printer. So, it seems that all your graphics applications just ASSUME that the printer is in portrait mode (instead of setting it), and just blindly send graphics. Is this the fault of the printer? Why are you allowing users to alter the configuration of printers that hang off a network? The spooler should be controlling all the settings as needed. When a Lotus job is finished (or aborted), the spooler should reset the printer. |> Then we can decide to flame HP or not. ;) Go ahead, but this looks too much like pilot error. PS: Although I do work for HP, I do not work for the division responsible for LaserJets. -- Tony Parkhurst ( tony@sdd.HP.COM ) "free people need no drug laws" -- James A. Parker
twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) (03/13/91)
In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com> tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes: > >Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are >not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? Oops, it does say this in the manual? Well, a couple of years of grad students passing through and a handful of staffs couldn't find this. So much for our reading abilities... ;) I guess we were looking at the wrong place. > >The problem is that the LaserJet people put a lot of effort in allowing >users to set defaults to be whatever they want, instead of always >requiring drivers (and applications) to properly configure the printer. >So, it seems that all your graphics applications just ASSUME that the >printer is in portrait mode (instead of setting it), and just blindly >send graphics. Is this the fault of the printer? > >Why are you allowing users to alter the configuration of printers that hang >off a network? The spooler should be controlling all the settings as >needed. When a Lotus job is finished (or aborted), the spooler should >reset the printer. > Well, even though we have our computers on ethernet for TCP/IP access to our Suns, we haven't found any decent printspooling software for TCP/IP (yes, our PC-NFS is just sitting on the shelf collecting dust :) ). So our Laserjets are not on any network. In fact, most of our Laserjets are dedicated for one machine only and some dataswitches here and there. (we're not your biggest customer but aside from a dot matrix here and there and two Laserwriters for the Macs, all our printers are Laserjets sw we have enough to go around without networking). Anyways, we have a university environment with grad students doing resarch. They produce data files that are many columns long. And being Engineers that we are, we have been using Lotus 123 since version 1 for processing data. And we also need to print things out. Hence, landscape. Now if you are familiar with Lotus 123, you change the printer mode by a setup string. Now we have been teaching our students each year about setup strings and have photocopy sheets of what you need to do what. Some get it, and some don't. And those setup strings are so nasty that if you type in a lower case "t" instead of uppercase "t" for example, things don't work, knock on the door, debugging time. And those setup strings being 10-20 characters long, these errors happens often and it's annoying having to type these bloody things in (correctly) each time. So we also have print outs of the fonts and it's a lot easier for students to understand that they need to change to font I20 for landscape compress than to have to type in ^jy^h76&*jn for one and &^8hY&hj*7hn for another font. (note: the above setup strings are garbage, they're just examples) And in a lot of cases, after the students comes back from the field have 20 files of data from the pressurememter, for example, they would just set the font to landscape and copy the files to prn for hardcopies. No programs involved. And when we program using a text editor, and we want to print out our source code (ok, my programs do exceed 80 cols and goes off the screen frolm time to time. But I'm a C programmer, I want to do everything in one line. :) ), I print things in landscape because of my code and I often use the space on the right side of the page for writing down notes/comments. And none of our text editors has printer mode changing capabilities within their print facility. So I have to do it from the panel. I used QEdit most of the time. Hhmm.. let's see, those should be the main reasons with misc convenience reasons I don't care to mention. But now that you say it is in the manual, the oversight was on our part then. And nobody I've told knew about this either. Oh well, we don't have to understand how a car works to know that we don't make it do things that it couldn't do. Thanks for the info. Thomas.
leo@hoss.unl.edu (Leo Chouinard) (03/13/91)
In <1991Mar13.033650.3496@unixg.ubc.ca> twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) writes: >In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com> tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes: >> >>Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are >>not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? >Oops, it does say this in the manual? Well, a couple of years of grad >students passing through and a handful of staffs couldn't find this. >So much for our reading abilities... ;) I guess we were looking at the >wrong place. I have a LaserJet IIP. I don't know about other LaserJets, but the Technical Reference Manual for that printer clearly indicates that graphics is supported in landscape mode. Leo Chouinard leo@hoss.unl.edu
tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) (03/14/91)
|> In <1991Mar13.033650.3496@unixg.ubc.ca> twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) writes: |> >In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com> tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes: |> >> |> >>Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are |> >>not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? |> >Oops, it does say this in the manual? Well, a couple of years of grad |> >students passing through and a handful of staffs couldn't find this. |> >So much for our reading abilities... ;) I guess we were looking at the |> >wrong place. |> I have a LaserJet IIP. I don't know about other LaserJets, but the |> Technical Reference Manual for that printer clearly indicates that |> graphics is supported in landscape mode. Oops^2, I blew this one. It was a "compatible" printer that did not do this. LaserJet does support graphics while in landscape mode, however, without changing the CAP or setting the "presentation mode" (LJ III), then your normal graphics will go off the page, and you will probably not see anything. -- Tony Parkhurst ( tony@sdd.HP.COM ) "free people need no drug laws" -- James A. Parker
twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) (03/15/91)
Thank you for all the emails I've received. I'll just address all the questions/comments here in one post. - Thanks for all the support and sympathy. I thought my question was legitimate as well (I still can't find discussion on this topic in the manual)(And it looks like I'm not the only one who can't find it). I guess I caught Tony on a bad day and I just happened to have asked the "right" question at the "right" time. ;) Thanks again everybody. - Yes, I think this is a major problem in MS DOS world. Thanks for all those who did the tests themselves. The only program I could get graphics printouts while the printer is in Landscape mode is MS Word. (Ooops, I think WordPerfect worked as well). Even the other "major" MS DOS packages such as Freelance, Lotus 123, Grapher, paint programs,... all failed. I haven't tried Windows get because we just got the new version of CorelDraw so I'll test it on that when I'm done. But if Windows doesn't work, this maybe something someone should look into. - The concensous I got, and I agree with, is regardless of who's bug this is (HP or MSDOS programs), this is a "bug". As a programmer, the longest time taken in writing a program is during the testing debugging stage. You must test all combinations of all commands and make sure things work before you release the program. But of course someone somewhere will always try a combination that you've never thought of and crashes the program. ;) - Yes, I do agree that I shouldn't have to learn the PCL language to be able to use the Laserjet. The program is supposed to take care of all that. These things should be hidden from the enduser. And maybe that's why the Laserjet manual doesn't have this note boldface large lettering sticking out somewhere obvious. The only person that actually found something on this is found it in the PCL language section talking about how one would print in landscape in graphics mode by moving the cursor to the right....etc. I didn't care to learn PCL now. When I have time in the future, I'd be interested in learning the language, but don't have time now. Thanks again for all the responses. I'll try Windows and see if it resets the printer into portrait mode before printing. If not, maybe I should address this question in msdos appl programming group. Thomas.
wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu (Clarence Wilkerson) (03/15/91)
I think any program that prints to a printer without knowing or forcing the printer into the correct mode is "sloppy", whether you paid $0 or $500 for it. I have several programs that use graphics in the landscape mode ( Harvard graphics, Windows stuff, TeX dvi drivers etc), so I don't think it's a universal problem. Just because the machine doesn't work the way one ideally imagines that it should, doesn't mean that it's a bug. I think that on a 8088 chip, MOV DS,CS should be a legal instruction. ( It's not.). On page 11-7 of Laser series II Printer Technical Reference Manual, it says " On the LaserJet series II, raster graphics rows are printed along the width of the physical page, regardless of the logical page orientation.... " A picture is provided at the bottom of the page to make this clear. The result is that one has to massage the graphics output to make it come out in the correct orientation. Basically the same massaging has to happen when you download fonts for the landscape mode that are intended for the portrait mode. There is no internal PCL operation on the HPLJII to rotate. The reason for these annoyances I suspect is the layout of physical mmeory. It's easy to implement quicky raster rows that go along successive memory locations and harder (slower) to do raster columns that don't use adjacent bytes. Clarence Wilkerson
twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) (03/16/91)
In article <7947@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu.UUCP (Clarence Wilkerson) writes: > On page 11-7 of Laser series II Printer Technical Reference Manual, >it says > " On the LaserJet series II, raster graphics rows are printed along >the width of the physical page, regardless of the logical page orientation.... >" >A picture is provided at the bottom of the page to make this clear. > Yes, that was what I thought too. And that was one of the problems why I was looking at the wrong place. After reading that "printed along the width of the physical page", I figured that even if the orientation was wrong, I would just get my image chopped off. That's why I said to myself at the very beginning that this must not be the problem since I was getting blanks sheets. That's why I ignored it and was looking elsewhere. But now we know why. As others have pointed out, in the PCL language, if you leave the cursor position at the origin of the landscape mode, then proceed to output in the portrait orientation, you'd be plotting off the page. Ain't computers fun? :) Thomas.
kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu (Bob Kusumoto) (03/16/91)
I don't get this message. Then again, I also have an additional 4MB of RAM
in the printer as well :-)
Bob
--
Bob Kusumoto | I just come from the land of
Internet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu | the sun/ from a war that must
Bitnet: kusumoto%chsun1@uchicago[.bitnet] | be won in the name of truth.
UUCP: ...!{oddjob,gargoyle}!chsun1!kusumoto | - New Order, "Love Vigilantes"twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong) (03/16/91)
I have tested MS Windows graphics printout after setting the LJ to landscape and found that it works. So Window is smart enough to set the LJ correctly. So all Windows applications should work. That's one for Microsoft. :) Thomas.
pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) (03/16/91)
In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com>, tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes: > > Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are > not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? > Yes it does, I've seen it in every manual from the original LaserJet on, but it's not an "intuitive" limitation so probably not noticed by many people (hey, the LaserJet IIPs we brought a while ago would take a solid 100 hours to print all of the docs that came with them, no? ) > Why are you allowing users to alter the configuration of printers that hang > off a network? The spooler should be controlling all the settings as > needed. When a Lotus job is finished (or aborted), the spooler should > reset the printer. > A lot of us DON'T hang our LaserJets off a network. Some of us even resort to printer-sharing boxes/switches (gulp. how primitive. But we DO have a network. really.). So the "rule" I promulgated in my shop was Draconian but simple: "Thou shalt make no assumptions about settings before thee". This generally works, except that 123 is so primitive. I find it semi- incredible, actually, that Lotus hasn't been able to bring itself to spend a few bucks to put a decent printer interface in its cash cow.. Unfortunately for my users, Berlitz doesn't teach LJspeak, which I find only a shade easier to learn than Russian. > > PS: Although I do work for HP, I do not work for the division responsible > for LaserJets. > I don't work for HP at all, but I think that LJs are as good a class of computer product as there is. greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org
pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) (03/16/91)
In article <3278@canisius.UUCP>, pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) writes: > In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com>, tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes: > > > > Why do you assume that this is a bug? The manual says that graphics are > > not supported while in Landscape mode. How do you think it should behave? > > > Yes it does, I've seen it in every manual from the original LaserJet > on, .... I hit the 's' button on the above, looked up from my monitor and there staring at me was a graphic printed on an HP LJIIP, produced via DrawPerfect..... Ok, I SWEAR there's something about all this in the manual, some wierd limitation, but I'll be damned if I am going to look for it now (I'd sooner hit "n" on the flames). apologies, pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org
jrc@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com (Jim Conrad) (03/18/91)
> The reason for these annoyances I suspect is the layout of physical >mmeory. It's easy to implement quicky raster rows that go along >successive memory locations and harder (slower) to do raster columns >that don't use adjacent bytes. Close... Either the printer would need to have enough memory to model the entire page, or the image would have to be transmitted by columns (instead of rows) to deal with graphics in landscape mode. Transmitting the image by columns in landscape mode is the same problem (for the application programs) as transmitting it by rows in portrait mode. JimC PS. Thanks for reading the manual first, but the HP Personal Peripheral Assist Line should be able to answer questions like this one. You pay for the call to (208) 323-2551, but there's no charge for LaserJet support.