Re: hp4000 printers

[Michael Piotrowski]

Albert Kinderman <address@hidden> writes:

> In my case, I was talking about a "sneaker net."  I take a floppy
> downstairs to the secretary's computer and "print" the lout produced ps
> file using the dos command
> 
> copy /b file.ps > prn 
> 
> to the local printer connected to the parallel port.
> 
> The file, all 65 pages, prints correctly; the only problem is that one
> extra page is produced with the word TIMEOUT in very large type.  The
> printer doesn't timeout during the job; just the word is printed on one
> page following the completion of the job.

This behavior is completely natural: The PostScript interpreter
expects an End of Job character (^D), which doesn't arrive, so it
eventually times out.

It is the spooler's responsibility to notify the printer that the job
is finished.  If you're printing thru a spooler and you get a timeout,
the spooler is misconfigured.  If you're talking directly to the
printer (e.g., using DOS copy as you describe above) you have to
ensure yourself that the printer is notified of the end of the job;
you can do this by simply sending a file that contains nothing but a
^D character, e.g. "copy /b file.ps ctrld.txt > prn" (or something
like that), where ctrld.txt is a file that contains the ^D.  This
should do the job.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A. <address@hidden>
Electronic Technologies, Springer-Verlag Heidelberg