henry (08/04/82)
The vertical-margins problem has been solved, and without any munging of the hardware. It turns out that our documentation is decidedly out of date. (It may perhaps have been up-to-date for the first Sanders we got, but it does not match the current one.) The arrangements for telling the printer which paper-feed mechanism you have are different, and this matters because for some feed mechanisms the printer must do extra vertical motion to bring a new sheet into position. The Sanders folks described the proper switch setting for tractor feed, and when we tried it, it worked. We have experimentally printed a document or two on it, and everything seems to be fine. The only remaining problem is something we expected from earlier tests: it does go through ribbons at a fair rate. The rate may actually be no worse than that of the 1750, but it's definitely going to be noticeable by line-printer standards. General availability is coming. Some work on spoolers and whatnot is needed, nroff terminal tables have to be generated, and some rather odd interactions between the terminal tables and the kludgier parts of the Zoology macros need to be cleared up.