🚀 go-pugleaf

ferch@ucs.ubc.ca (Les Ferch) writes:
>One product that promises to do this in a slick way is called "EtherWrite
>LPR" from Compatible Systems. The product was announced in July but has
>not shipped yet. I talked to the company this week and they think it will
>be ready to ship sometime in February - we'll see. EtherWrite LPR is a box
>that has two ports, one plugs into the LocalTalk port on a printer and the
>other plugs into an ethernet network. It handles both EtherTalk from Macs
>(i.e. printer shows up in Chooser) and TCP/IP (print from Unix systems
>using lpr). It will have a SRP of about $1000.

We just got a couple of Dayna Etherprint boxes for our printers which
have only Localtalk and RS-232 ports.  They were around $300 a piece.
So you can save about $700 by just using something like CAP in conjunction
with one of these boxes.  I prefer to use PAP/Ethertalk over lpr/TCP/IP
when I have a choice because PAP is bidirectional so you can get PostScript
errors back from the printer - which is important to us.

Because the printer's we have do not support Adobe's Binary Communication
Protocol (BCP) over the serial ports, they are next to useless when
connected to the serial port of a UNIX box.  We cannot send binary image
data to the printer, so the UNIX applications have to generate straight
ASCII PostScript. When serving as print spoolers for the Macs, I use
a filter which preprocesses the jobs before they go out.  It looks for
%%BeginBinary comments and converts binary image data to ASCII, and
redefines the readstring operator.  It doesn't work in all cases, and it's
just plain slow to send twice as many bytes for each sample in an
image at 38400 baud.

So if you just have one or two printers, I'd go with the Etherprint boxes
and CAP, but if you have a bunch of Localtalk and RS-232 only devices, you
might consider a Gatorbox or something like that.  I just saw an ad for
something from Dayna called a "Pathfinder" for around $700.  If that
is a Localtalk<->Ethertalk bridge for $700, that's way cheaper than a
Gatorbox.


-Jonathan		hue@island.COM