printers -- printers -- printers

[Shepard@MCKENZIE.S&C.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (Tom Shepard)]

    Date: Thu, 8 Nov 90 11:31 EST
    From: bill@CASSIOPEIA.Mystech.DialNet.Symbolics.com (Bill Anderson)

    Hi,

    This is a request for experience or suggestions or ???

    Situation:

    We are starting an investigation into what options (if any) we have for selecting a new
    printer. We currently have an lgp3 and it works fine, but is majorly slow. We have occasion
    to print 500-700 page reports/analyses and wouldn't even mind the speed of the lgp3 so much
    if it had a larger paper tray (so that we could leave it un-attended overnight).

    Anyway, the questions:

    Will any PostScript printer work? Or only Adobe PostScript printers (versus PostScript
    clones)?

    Has anyone had any problems/successes with faster printers?

    Is there a way to speedup the lgp3? 

Yes.  At least, we've done this for a 3650 printer host (bulkhead port),
and it appears to be reliable.  I've looked into doing for an Ivory host
(XL400), and it appears to be as easy, but hasn't been tested.


Three things need to be done: 

(1) Tell the host that it's serial port really can talk at 57600 baud.
Patch the function SERIAL:NBS-SCC-BAUD-CONSTANT to include 57600 in the
list of baud rates.

(2) Get the namespace to accept 57600 as the baud rate for the printer.
Unfortunately, the "Interface Options" "Baud" list does not contain
this, and the sources that you would need to add it are restricted.  So,
what I might suggest is to Edit Namespace Object Printer <printer-name>,
change the baud rate to some other value, save it, then ZMacs edit the
resulting <Namespace>-Object.text and
<Namespace>-Namespace-Changes.text, and make sure to save them back into
the SAME version.  Anybody have a better way?

(3) Tell the LGP3 (LaserwriterII-NTX) that it should talk at 57600 baud.
This cannot be done entirely through the DIP switches; there's some
"programming" of the printer envolved.  This can be somewhat difficult
to get going, but I can give you the details if you're interested.
Fortunately, the changes are persistent across power-down and
unplugging, AS LONG AS the DIP switches are not touched.  Changing them,
then returning them to the correct position erases the changes.


Our users were VERY happy to have 15 min reports take only 2.5 mins.

					Get larger capacity paper trays?

    Are there any PostScript printers that can connect directly onto the ethernet?
    If so, does one have to build his own network spooler for this?

    Is there any move within Symbolics to "officially" support other printer options?

    Are there any other questions I need to be concerned with?

    Thanks in advance...
	    -ba