jcwasik@PacBell.COM (Joe Wasik) (02/06/91)
Hewlett-Packard is finally shipping the printer drivers that allows you to use the DESKJET 500 under Windows 3.0. The bug list in the README files is surprisingly long - though I am not clear whether these bugs are in the driver or in the application (Word, Excel, etc). There is, however, one serious bug in the driver that prevents the use of the Print facility under the File Manager. It appears that the driver attempts to place too many lines of text onto a page. The DESKJET 500 can normally only handle 61 lines. The driver tries to print 62 and that last line gets chopped. I've called technical support. They did not know about the problem, but they were able to reproduce it quite easily. They said that this problem may not be fixed. There apparently is no known way around this (yet?). Yes, the DESKJET 500 does have dip switches that control such things as lines-per-page, but these settings can be ignored by the software - and in this case, it is. Any additional knowledge in the Usenet world will be appreciated. -- Joe Wasik, Pacific Bell, 2600 Camino Ramon, San Ramon, CA (415)823-2422 email: jcwasik@clib.PacBell.COM or [...]!pacbell!clib!jcwasik These opinions are all mine, but just barely...
grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham S Thomas) (02/08/91)
From article <8558@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>, by jcwasik@PacBell.COM (Joe Wasik): > Hewlett-Packard is finally shipping the printer drivers that allows you > to use the DESKJET 500 under Windows 3.0. Assuming this is the 'scalable font driver', I have a query that probably doesn't relate to the original posting (which was about the way the driver tries to print an extra line on each page). The docs with the driver say that it will print more slowly than the old one. My question is, how slow should we expect it to be? We tried it on our 2mb PS/2 55s and had to wait over two minutes for the first page of text (in Times Roman, but no fancy formatting) to appear - we're using Word for Windows. Trying the same thing on an otherwise identical 4mb machine resulted in a quicker printout (approx. 1 min 15 secs for the first page.) Microsoft UK say 2mb should be ample memory. We can get things to move faster by giving Print Manager high priority, or by bypassing it altogether, but it's still much slower than the old driver and there's still a difference between the 2mb and 4mb machines. Does anyone have any tips on how to get a faster printout. I've tried tweaking config.sys files and doing various things suggested in the 'optimising Windows' section of the Windows manual, but there may well be things I've missed, as I've mostly worked in non-PC environments up to now. Thanks, Graham -- Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK INTERNET: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk JANET: grahamt@uk.ac.sussex.syma BITNET: grahamt%sussex.syma@UKACRL UUCP: grahamt%sussex.syma@ukc.uucp Phone: +44 273 678165 Fax: +44 273 685865
robertt@hp-vcd.HP.COM (Bob Taylor) (02/09/91)
Wrong! This is a none File Manager bug. File Manager ignores the height of text when determining whether or not to send the last line on each page. The net result is the following: If there is only one pixel height left on the page, File Manager still sends a full line of text, even if the line of text is 50 pixels tall. The result is the line of text being clipped. The workaround is to print the file from Notepad, which is at least somewhat intelligent. Remember, in Windows, the !application! determines what goes on each page - the driver has no control of this - it just does the best job it can with what it is sent. Note that you will see this bug with many other printers/drivers. On most, you'll just "lose" the last line on each page - on some, you'll get that line by itself on a new page. bob taylor HP Vancouver p.s. Yes, I know I used none instead of known on the first line of this post - it's early and I'm still half asleep.