NFS vs. PC Interface w/ SCO ODT...

[Daniel A. Graifer]

In article <835 at iiasa.UUCP> wnp at iiasa.UUCP (wolf paul) writes:
>In article <568 at bohra.cpg.oz> als at bohra.cpg.oz (Anthony Shipman) writes:
>)An, if not the, advantage of PC-I is the remote printing. It will redirect
>)from LPT: to a spooler on the UNIX server....

Two points about PC-I's printer capture.

The timeout is a user selectable number of seconds (separately setable for
each LPT device), and either or both printer-time-out and print-on-exit can
be disabled.  This is useful with dumb DOS programs that don't send setup
strings: just disable print-on-exit and timeout, echo your printer setup string
from the DOS prompt, and run your application.  We've had to make the batch file
that start Lotus 1-2-3 set the timeout way up...it goes to sleep for 10-15
seconds at a time during a large, multipage print.  Most applications work
fine at 10 seconds.

The second point is that PCI will pipe the captured print stream (including
print-screen output) to any shell command.  I've used this pipe the output
from brain-damaged DOS programs thru 'od' to figure out why the output wasn't
formatting correctly.  We use this regularly to change SYSV lp options when
running different DOS applications.  For example, we have one application 'PD'
that only knows about epson printers.  We run it out of a batch file that
sets the print capture to 'lp -oPD'.  The lp/interface scripts for our HP
LaserJets take this option as a signal to run the text through a sed script
that translates epson printer codes to their HP equivelent.  Similar games
are played to distinquish between postscript cognizant and ignorant DOS 
applications writing to our postscript printers.

Dan

-- 
Daniel A. Graifer			Franklin Mortgage Capital Corporation
uunet!dag at fmccva.franklin.com		7900 Westpark Drive, Suite A130
(703)448-3300				McLean, VA  22102