🚀 go-pugleaf

Dov, Your last paragraph is true, but as I'm sure you are aware that there are quite a few printers that don't support hardware collation and yet behave as expected with Windows 95/98. 

I now have reasonable grounds to blame the Win2000 spooler.  The same symptoms are exhibited with the PCL driver for the HP 5M. 

I wonder why you didn't just say: "the bug is in the Windows 2000 spooler, the Adobe driver tells the spooler that the device doesn't support collation (from the PPD) and it ignores this information except in the case where the port is a local parallel port.  The Windows 95/98 spooler responds appropriately when the driver tells it that the device does not support collation." 

I now imagine the messages between spooler are like this. 

In the LPT1 case: Spooler asks driver: does the device support collation? Driver says: No Spooler thinks to itself: OK, I'll generate the document n times because this is the behaviour which the user expects. 

In every other case (FILE/queue): Spooler asks driver: does the device support collation? Driver says: No Spooler thinks to itself: Even though I know better, and this will irritate the user, I'll ask the driver for uncollated copies. 

I wonder if Microsoft fixed this in XP.  I wonder where I can find a replacement spooler for Win2000. 

Thanks. 

Oh, about your reference to non-GDI applications.  I don't know about InDesign or Acrobat, but I know that PageMaker reads the PPD directly/independantly and generates PostScript independently from the "printer driver".  PageMaker should be smart enough to realize that the device does not support collation.  I don't know how it behaves, but the bug in the Win2000 spooler should not affect it. 

If InDesign reads the PPD then InDesign should work fine.  Acrobat does not read the PPD independently from the driver.  It may be affected by this problem.