Jeff Kell writes:
>
> Is anyone successfully using LPQ-1200 printers with Network Printing?

Sort of.  :-(

> We purchased one to replace our 2566 printers which are going off
> maintenance soon (as was mentioned in an earlier thread) and we don't
> want to risk running them off of HP-IB on our 969/120.
>
> At first glance, it looked like everything was working.  The printer
> runs in PCL-II emulation mode and seems to get along with network
> printing with pjl_supported = TRUE.  Then things went terribly wrong.

PJL/PLR does initially seem to work, but eventually becomes terribly brain
damaged.  I've tested this on the latest firmware.

The official word from the printer division is that PJL/PLR is not supported
yet on the LPQ printers.  *Maybe* by the end of the year.  It sure would be
nice to have the forward spacing and backward spacing ability to recover
from paper jams.

Aside from PJL/PLR, we have a *MULTI-YEAR* software call open regarding the
network spooler's improper (IMHO) handling of %102/%103 perf-skip CCTLs.
Special forms where we needed to print more than 60 lines per page (and thus
into the perf-skip area) were doing an extra page eject at the start of the
perf skip area and then printing one or two or three lines on the top of the
next page before doing another page eject.

We obtained a manually applied :DEBUG binary patch for OUTSPTJ.PUB.SYS which
fixes the problem.  A site patch (MPEKX56A) was *finally* written earlier
this year to implement a new NPCONFIG parameter serial_printer_simulation that
would enable the old %102/%103 functionality, but this patch is broken.  It
works on my porting machine, but fails on my production machine, resulting in
many pages of garbage at the front of certain spoolfiles.  The same spoolfile
prints OK on the porting machine, but gets garbaged on the production machine.
I suspect an uninitialized variable somewhere.  I think this past August was
the most recent activity on this patch.

Because of these network printing issues and others not mentioned here, we
still use Minisoft's NetPrint92 spooler.  Many or most spoolfiles will
print OK with MPE network printing, but there are enough exceptions such that
we still need NetPrint92.
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
Technical Support               Voice: +1 714 438-4647
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)