[comp.sys.mac.misc] Modifying 6.? LaserPrep for 80 Character Line Limit

jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) (04/27/91)

We have access to a colour laserprinter, which is attached to a
VMS VAX, and which is accessed via ftp. The basic problem we
have is the VMS spooler on this machine has a line limit of 80
characters (!!). The system programmers for this machine do
have a program to help get round this - it adjusts postscript
so that the lines are less that 80 characters long [I don't
think it is very complicated (:], but this cannot cope with
strings longer than 80 characters. The problem? Well the
LaserPrep for the 6.? driver (v70 I believe) has a load of hex
strings at the top, which are much longer than 80 characters.
For us to procede, we need a way of breaking these up.

Any suggestions, or alternative ideas, would be appreciated.

When (if?) we get this working, we plan to set it up so that a
CAP lswrv is provided which will pick up the (hopefully)
modified laserprep, feed it through the 80 char conversion
program, and then ftp the given data. We have already
downloaded the new laserprep onto the CAP host, and it seems to
work fine - on our b/w laser that is.

John Forrest,
Dept of Computation
UMIST

zben@ni.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (04/29/91)

In article <1991Apr27.130313.29659@cns.umist.ac.uk> jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk
(John Forrest) writes:

> We have access to a colour laserprinter, which is attached to a
> VMS VAX, and which is accessed via ftp. The basic problem we
> have is the VMS spooler on this machine has a line limit of 80
> characters (!!). The system programmers for this machine do
> have a program to help get round this - it adjusts postscript
> so that the lines are less that 80 characters long [I don't
> think it is very complicated (:], but this cannot cope with
> strings longer than 80 characters. The problem? Well the
> LaserPrep for the 6.? driver (v70 I believe) has a load of hex
> strings at the top, which are much longer than 80 characters.
> For us to procede, we need a way of breaking these up.
 
> Any suggestions, or alternative ideas, would be appreciated.

The long lines of hexadecimal are actually 68000 machine language programs.
The one near the top is a patch for a particular revision of a particular
Apple printer type, if you don't have one of these you can take it out.

The two big hex blocks near the bottom are a "stretch" routine and a
"smooth4" routine.  Again, unless the printer is 68000-based these routines
are never used.

Also, the hex scanner should ignore whitespace, so you should be able to
break these lines up in any convenient way (though for safety's sake I would
break them at byte boundaries...) to fit within 80 characters.

It might even work if you were to find them in the LaserPrep resource file
and put in explicit newline characters...