printer request difficulties

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 9 Sep 88 16:58:34 N
    From: baechler%elma.epfl.ch@cunyvm.cuny.edu

    Hi, guys
      Here we have a lot of problems with our printer that people form
    Symbolics (Europe) have not been able to solve.

      We have a network of three machines (running 7-2 with ECO) connected via
    chaos. There are two 3650 and one 3620 machines. The 3620 one handles
    the printer, which is a QMS-PS 800+, but is not configured as a file
    server.

    (1) We can only print files form the machine handling the print-spooler.
	If we try from another one, we get the following error message:

	On the machine where the harcopy command was issued:
	[<Date> From <Machine-with-printer>: Irrecoverable Error on printer:
	<printer>: Irrecoverable device error]

	A posscript error occurs at the same time with the message:
	Error: undefined
	Offendning Command: 7.92f0

I'll bet the Lispm without the attached printer has its
*READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* set to something other than SINGLE-FLOAT.
The Symbolics LGP hardcopy software must be writing floating point
numbers into the Postscript file using a Lisp printing function such as
PRINT.  These will produce "<mantissa>e<exponent>", which is compatible
with Postscript, only when the object is of the default float format.

                                                barmar