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serial printer hangs on last page of job

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It's funny how people don't think about how slow printers really are. Regularly I hear someone say something like "We're changing these serial printers to parallel (or network) because they are too slow". That's silly - even a fast 500cps printer can't keep up with 9600 baud serial

Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
From: bv@wjv.com (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: Multiple Print jobs hang on last page of first job
Message-ID: <IDsJI7.xvK@wjv.com>
References: <1111411635.387108.22950@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1111425866.171700.102230@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> <1111524654.222288.151280@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 06:05:02 GMT

In article <1111524654.222288.151280@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
 <alb@opensystemscomputing.com> wrote:
>
>Tony  Lawrence wrote:
>> alb@opensystemscomputing.com wrote:
>> > SCO 5.0.7 Enterprise. Digi Classicboard multi-port serial board. 2
>> > different serial printers.
>> >
>> > Printing one job at a time works fine. Printing 2 or more jobs at
>> once
>> > (via batch file), the first job hangs on the last page of the job.
>> Have
>> > checked permissions & ownership. Have tried different interface
>> > scripts.
>>
>>
>> An upgrade?  I vaguely remember something like this when I upgrade a
>> very old 3.2v4 system to 3.2v5.something - it was the old interface
>> scripts - don't recall why they were broken but they were - do an
>> lpadmin -p printer -m rightnewmodel fixed it..
>>
>> --
>> Tony Lawrence
>> http://aplawrence.com

>Wasn't an upgrade (brand new 5.0.7 install), but here are some more
>clues: They are using the okiml320 interface script. In the past, they
>have always modified this script to change the stty line from "stty
>raw" to "stty raw ixon ixoff" (to help with longer print jobs) If they
>don't make the change, the jobs don't hang, but job 2 starts right
>after the last line of job 1 (doesn't form feed) and the top of job2 is
>"squished" into a space 1 or 2 lines high.

They really need to change to hardware handshake on the printers.
xon/xoff is always a problem - and some of the Oki's firmware just
wasn't as fast as it should be.

If they must run with xon/xoff make sure the data rate is set down
to about the same maximum speed of the printer.  That means
1200bps or 2400bps.  1200bps is 120 character per second.  2400 bps
is 240 characters per second and only the more expensive DMs can
print higher than that.  This will help the xon/xoff perform better
as you will be running near the limit of the printer and not
overwhelming it buffer by a factor of 4:1

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
 

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