Apple LW jam on Sun/TOPS hookup - Help!

Lee Melvin melvin at cgdra.cgd.ucar.edu
Fri Sep 21 10:11:31 AEST 1990


I have a somewhat aggravating problem that has so far frustrated me to no
end:

Some of the landscape files created by dvips will jam our printers.

Our systems are primarily Sun Sparcstations, with a 3/280 and a 4/280 as
servers.  We've got a few NCD xterminals thrown in for good measure.  We
have 6 Apple Laserwriter IINTX's connected to our machines via Appletalk
and Sun's TOPS box and software.  We also have 1 LW IINTX connected
directly to a sparcstation.  We're running SunOS 4.0.3 and TOPS 2.2.

In all cases, the postscript produced by dvips will print just fine on our
one LW which is direct connected.  On all the TOPS printers, the job
enters the queue, is shown as 'active' on a 'ready and printing' queue,
and the 'in use' light on the printer blinks.  And blinks. And blinks --
for at least 2 days.  Someone suggested that I get ahold of some
error-handling software for the printer, so I ended up with a file called
'ehandler.ps', which has absolutely no effect on the print job.  Also, the
problem only occurs on landscape files.  The dvips 'tack-on' postscript
header has a definition for '@landscape' and '@letter'.  You can change
'landscape' for 'letter' in a problem file and it will print just fine.
The postscript must be legitimate, though, as it will print on our one
direct-connect.

It seems rather likely then, that the problem is either in the Appletalk
network, the TOPS box, or the TOPS software.  Is it possible that one of
these components could be interpreting part of the file, or losing the EOF
for the print job?  Any help or comments on what I could do next would be
greatly appreciated, cause I'm stumped.

I took one of the problematic files and whittled it down in the hopes of
isolating the error ("I can jam that printer in... 256 characters!").
This is a copy of the result:

%!PS-Adobe-2.0
200 dict 
begin 
[0 1 -1 0 0 0]concat 
300 dup 
72 300 div dup neg scale translate
/Times-Roman findfont
15 scalefont
setfont
502 113 moveto 
(R)
24 1464 3 -1 roll show moveto 
2520 3 false 
[1 0 0 -1 0 -1]{8 string}
imagemask 
showpage
end

The Times-Roman font was not part of the original file (there was a
defined font in the file that I stripped out), but this one still causes a
jam.  Feel free to post or email me, as you like.  Any and all help
greatly appreciated.

~~~ melvin at ncar.ucar.edu,melvin at snoopy.colorado.edu,melvin at boulder.bitnet ~~~\
 Lee Melvin | _Total Recall_ - Arnold Schwartzenegger, Sharon Stone, ILM, \| |
 CGD / NCAR |    sci-fi, blood, guts & more - it just doesn't get better! |\ |
___ DISCLAIMER:  I'm not a scientist, they just let me play with the Y-MP ___/



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