Re: Postscript printer on net (again)

[olson@juliet.ll.mit.edu]

	Date: Thu, 4 Oct 90 14:24 PDT
	From: Mabry Tyson <TYSON@warbucks.ai.sri.com>

	I believe that Chris Linblad (CJL) has code for spooling across the net
	to, say, Imagen printers.  His code is probably more accessible (was this
	code part of what got on the SLUG tapes?) but I also have code that does this.

	Our code tries a direct connection (Imagen doesn't use FTP and it allows
	only one connection at a time) and if that fails, it ships the print job
	off to one of the hosts we have as (Lispm) print spoolers for that
	printer.

	(Imagen (which is now part of QMS, I believe) supports Ultrascript which
	is their version of Postscript.  It also supports their own protocols.
	It really is nice to have a screen dump in my hand 35-40 seconds after hitting
	Function-Q!)


This is exactly my situation.  The Symbolics->Imagen package works really
well and does indeed print out screen dumps with amazing speed.  I once
tired of tweaking the package every time a new release came out (I know,
thats not too often) and asked software support if I could speak Postscript
directly to my Ultrascript-Imagen, using only supported software. The
answer: no dice.

	We don't support talking to printers that are directly on an Ethernet.
	I could suggest ways in which you could write some code ...

Getting it to work in 8.0 was a bit of a pain becaue it needs the now
unsupported lgp1 package.  So now you have two unsupported packages
to tweak and keep up to date. Groan.  Oh yeah, you need lgp1 fonts
also.  Anyway, I've done it for 8.0, so if anyone wants it, drop me line.
Has anybody out there added significant functionality?  What I have
is just an up-to-date version of CJL's original.


- Steve Olson
  MIT Lincoln Laboratory
  olson@juliet.ll.mit.edu