🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <262@heaven.woodside.ca.us>, I write, among other nonsense:
> Go read the green book, page 201, and look at the "userexec" procedure.
> There is code in there that flushes to a comment.  Notice that it uses
> the "readline" operator, as suggested by Ben Cranston.
> 
> The bottom line is that the technique of using "readstring" and "eq"
> can never be made to work 100% of the time.

As several of you have pointed out through Email and as Woody mentions,
I'm all wet; the code as posted would read three percent signs, or so
it would seem, if there were six of them somewhere along the way.

In article <262@heaven.woodside.ca.us>, I continue:
> I cannot understand it either, but it's more likely to be the way you
> transmit the file to the printer than it is the printer itself.  If you
> make the code better, along the lines of the various suggestions, it will
> not fail on the LC-890, or I'll eat a toner cartridge.

I'm not ready to eat the toner cartridge yet.  Have you ever had the
experience of starting with a conclusion that you know to be true, and
then working backwards to a plausible explanation, rather than trying
to actually analyze the problem at hand?  Well, that's what I was doing.
And I still think the the conclusion that I know to be true is that the
NEC LC-890 is not throwing away comments in the serial driver.  A lot of
other things might be happening, but I won't believe that's one of them
unless Ed Taft tells me so.

But, rather than shut up, which is probably what I should do, I'll venture
some more half-baked thoughts :-)

>The fonts were supplied on  MS-DOS disks, along with screen fonts for
>windows.  The platform was an AT clone, connected to the NEC via a Centronics
>paralell port.  My platform consists of an AT clone connected to a PS-810
>via a Centronics port.  Both copy and print techiniques were tried, as well
>as telling Windows to treat the fonts as non permanent fonts to be downloaded
>on the fly.  In all 3 cases on both platforms, the result was the same.
>Just for grins, I guess I'll drive over there and try it again.

Perhaps it is related to the parallel port somehow?  I've never driven a
PostScript printer through a parallel port.  I suppose it is possible that
the parallel driver does different things than the serial driver does, and
one of them might be to throw away comments.  That might also explain why
the test program I posted a while back, which would indicate that the
comments *were* getting through, might not have worked for Woody.  Woody,
howzabout testing it on the serial port while you're there (if you're still
there, after having driven over to try it again :-)

It's also possible that the program is just getting a PostScript error
somewhere and is flushing the rest of the file; I assume that Woody would
catch this, though.

>My original suspicion was that someone figured that it was wasteful of
>interpreter time to have to wade through comments, so decided to filter
>them out instantly.

I'd stake that toner cartridge that this isn't happening on AppleTalk or
the serial port, but I have no idea about Centronics, other than to think
that it should be pretty much the same.

I know that test program I wrote a while ago is lost, so here's another
one that should print the string "%%Comments are getting through" if they
in fact are getting through, and will print nothing if not:

---------------------------- cut here ---------------------
%!
/buff 30 string def
currentfile buff readstring
%%Comments are getting through

100 100 moveto /Helvetica findfont 18 scalefont setfont
buff show
showpage
---------------------------- and here ---------------------

Several of you helpful folks out there reported that the other program
I posted a while back worked on your NEC LC-890 printers.  Just so we
squash this once and for all, how 'bout if people only report if it
DOESN'T work on their printer.  And if it doesn't, the more you can
report about your setup, the better.  Version of printer, connection
to host, kind of host, whatever.

Now I've become curious about this whole issue.  If it's a real
problem, it ought to pop up all over the place, not just on Woody's
system, unless the intersection between people who read
comp.lang.postscript and those driving PS printers over Centronics
ports from PC clones is a very small set, which I would be happy to
believe.

Glenn

P.S.  If it ends up that I have to eat a toner cartridge, please send me
only new toner cartridges that will fit in the LaserWriter II NTX :-)

-- 
 Glenn Reid				RightBrain Software
 glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us		PostScript/NeXT developers
 ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn		415-851-1785