isaac@goanna.oz (Isaac Balbin) (02/17/89)
I feel sure many others have experienced this, I am curious, however, how they deal with it --- under Unix. I use Rokicki's dvi2ps translator from TeX to postscript. Indeed, the same thing happens for dvi2ps (by Holtz and Senn) in the standard distribution of TeX and I recall it also happened in the old days when I had to convert ditroff to postscript. What happens? After a certain amount of processing, something overflows and the rest of the large job does not print and finds its way to the great big bit-bucket in the sky. Normally, I print a large job (>30-40) pages (it also depends how much is in each page) in chunks. Is there a better solution that people use? That is, postscript code which looks after the laserprinter and doesn't let it proverbially dump core. (PS I also have to send a ^C to the printer to stop it processing after lprm'ing the rest of the job) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Isaac Balbin, Department of Computer Science, ACSNET: isaac@goanna.oz Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, JANET: isaac%goanna.oz.au@uk.ac.ukc GPO BOX 2476 V, ARPA: isaac%goanna.oz.au@uunet.uu.net Melbourne, 3001, CSNET: isaac%goanna.oz.au@australia AUSTRALIA UUCP: ...!uunet!goanna.oz.au!isaac Phone: +61 3 660 2803 BITNET: isaac%goanna.oz.au@relay.cs.net Fax : +61 3 663 2764 EARN: isaac%goanna.oz.au@uk.ac.rl.earn
mg@cidam.rmit.oz (Mike A. Gigante) (02/22/89)
In article <1936@goanna.oz>, isaac@goanna.oz (Isaac Balbin) writes: > I feel sure many others have experienced this, I am curious, > however, how they deal with it --- under Unix. > I use Rokicki's dvi2ps translator from TeX to postscript. > Indeed, the same thing happens for dvi2ps (by Holtz and Senn) in the > standard distribution of TeX and I recall it also happened in the old > days when I had to convert ditroff to postscript. > What happens? After a certain amount of processing, something overflows > and the rest of the large job does not print and finds its way to the great > big bit-bucket in the sky. Watching the messages that come back from the Laserwriter shpows that the casuse is a VMerror. I suspect that the dvi*ps programs are not as careful as they might be w.r.t. postscript data space (or code space?) The same documents print flawlessly with MicroTeX's laser package (and spr). I have a single page that I cannot print using dvi2ps! Very frustrating indeed! Mike
chris@softway.oz (Chris Maltby) (02/23/89)
The "bug" is caused by a design problem with garbage collection. Postscript jobs tend to accumulate fonts, and other junk as they execute. The best generic solution is to embed each page of text between a restore/save pair, and save the empty environment at start time. By restoring to the empty saved environment and then saving it again you can cause the VM garbage collection to work much better. Permanent fonts can be stored by restoring (to the backgroun environment) defining the font and then saving. Try it, it works. I have no troble printing huge troff documents with pic's tbl's and eqn's using such a system... -- Chris Maltby - Softway Pty Ltd (chris@softway.oz) PHONE: +61-2-698-2322 UUCP: uunet!softway.oz!chris FAX: +61-2-699-9174 INTERNET: chris@softway.oz.au