🚀 go-pugleaf

A question for Linux users of TeX.  Does anyone have experience with the
drivers for the LIPS3 graphics language spoken by Canon Laser Shot printers? 
There are two that I know of, lips3dvi and dviprt.  I have compiled both and
tried the latter from a precompiled binary.  All fail with an error on
reading the .tfm files (which they nonetheless do find).

I have used lips3dvi on a Sun on a machine in Tokyo, and it does work.  And
I have compared a .tfm file from that machine with one on my own; no
difference between them.  I even fetched the Tokyo files and substituted
them; same error occurred.  I'm not much at C, but with a little mucking
around I managed to deduce that it's some sort of checksum that's failing. 
Dvips has no complaints about the same .tfm files.

All I can figure is that something is fundamentally different between Linux
1.1.52 (on my machine, with libc 2.5.8) and the version on which the
Japanese distribution of Linux is based (0.9-something, with libc 2.2.2 i
think maybe?).  The dviprt and lips3dvi versions that I have played with
also are meant to go with ASCII-JTeX, which *may* have something to do with
the problem (although if that were the case, the Tokyo machine should
have refused to process the .dvi file I created on my machine in London).

LIPS3 is very common in Japan.  Since TeX is not all that common in social
science institutions there (at least not in the departments I am in
contact with), it would save a lot of headache to be able to prepare
ready-made print images on my own computer for digestion by a colleague's
printer.

Any assistance anyone can offer will be greatly appreciated.  I am following
the lists to which this is being posted, so a response via either news or
email will reach me.

Many thanks,
--
Frank G Bennett, Jr
Law Department, SOAS, London
Tel: (071)323-6351
email: fbennett@rumple.soas.ac.uk
WWW: http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~fbennett/