[not about] Print Spooler Woes

["David A. Moon" <Moon@scrc-stony-brook.arpa>]

    Date: Mon, 15 Feb 88 08:24 AST
    From: Gavin L. Hemphill <Gavin@DREA-BALROG.ARPA>

    The only problem I
    have with the current setup is the fact that the spooler insists on
    printing things back to front so the stuff comes out stacked in the
    right order -- I WISH there were some way of turning this off, if you
    have a document with lots of downloaded fonts in it you get screwed.
    We've given up trying to print *.dvi files generated from the SLUG
    Library TEX due to this problem.

This is not a problem with the print spooler and not a problem with the
order of printing pages.  The problem is that the hardcopy system's
Postscript generator (this is software that runs on the user machine,
inside the Hardcopy File or similar command; the spooler just takes the
postscript and sends it to the printer) assumes (incorrectly) that the
printer has enough memory to hold all the fonts used in a document.
Unfortunately an LGP2 only has 240K bytes of memory, which is only
enough for a handful of fonts.  In addition, there are some "garbage
collection" bugs in the Postscript we generate.

Release 7.2 includes an improved Postscript generator that has a fairly
accurate model of memory allocation inside the printer.  The problem with
downloaded fonts is definitely fixed.  So, when you get 7.2 you might
want to give it another try.