eichi@forty2.UUCP (Stefan Eichenberger) (02/16/90)
Well, there is this daily fight between me as a PC freak and my girl
friend, which tries to convince me, that Macs are uncomparably better.
But now, we came up with some problems on the Mac side, we need expert
help: Two questions:
1. She operates a Mac Janet Server for a high school. Printers are
attached to it, but located in several class rooms. Now, plans are
for a timer to switch on the server in the morning and off after
hours. To our understanding of the documentation, Mac Janet requires
all printers to be up and running at the time the print spooler soft-
ware is initialized. This poses two problems:
- The Laser Writer next to the server needs several minutes to warm
up.
- Printers in neighbouring classrooms (ImageWriters) can't be connected
to the same timer as the server would be.
One could think of complicated hardware solutions with several timers
running syncroneaously but with the necessary offsets to provide ample
time for the printers to warm up.
But - to my understanding, biased by the PC world of course, there
should also be a pure software solution to it! Are there any appropriate
utilities, available from Simtel20 or Rice, or somewhere else? Other
solutions? Did we miss something in the documentation?
2. At the University, we have a Mac II running, with MS Word. But no
LaserWriter - what a pitty. There is a PostScript printer attached
to our host however. After doing quite a bit of research through all
sorts of Mac literature (not the manuals, of course, they were pretty
helpless), we found, that one has to install the LaserWriter Driver
as if there was a printer attached, then start printing a Word document
and immediatly press 'Command-K' to get the PostScript output to a file
rather than the not existing printer. (What an elegant solution - why
not just have a box to pop up, where you are asked for a file name?)
Then, we transmitted (via ftp) the file to Unix host - what a surprise,
it wouldn't print on our TI OmniWriter 2108 Laser Printer - PostScript,
but not APPLE LASERWRITER POSTSCRIPT ((c) Apple Computers, not Adobe?).
Any suggestions? I heard from a friend who had a program on a VAX to
translate the PS dialect to what it should have been right from the
beginning, but I really don't feel like transfering the PS file first
to a VAX only to translate it there, so that I could then transfer it to
our UNIX host!
Any utilities around, or tips on what we have to change on the PS files?
BTW, I always ask for utilities, because there are so many around in the
PC world - and the index file on Simtel20 in the PC/MSDos directory is even
commented - not so the Mac subdirectory index file - or do I again miss
something?
Thanks for any help - and sorry if this posting was in the wrong news group
or the questions have been asked recently. This is my first posting to the Mac
groups and I usually don't read them - however I'll do now to get any
follow-ups.
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UUCP: ...mcvax!cernvax!forty2!eichi Stefan Eichenberger
BITNET: K807817@CZHRZU1A University of Zurich
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