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From: twong@civil.ubc.ca (Thomas Wong)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers
Subject: Re: Found a bug in all Laserjets (??)
Message-ID: <1991Mar13.033650.3496@unixg.ubc.ca>
Date: 13 Mar 91 03:36:50 GMT
References: <1991Mar12.201750.28016@unixg.ubc.ca> <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com>
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In article <1991Mar12.154233@sdd.hp.com> tony@sdd.hp.com (Tony Parkhurst) writes:
>
>Why do you assume that this is a bug?  The manual says that graphics are
>not supported while in Landscape mode.  How do you think it should behave?

Oops, it does say this in the manual? Well, a couple of years of grad
students passing through and a handful of staffs couldn't find this.
So much for our reading abilities... ;) I guess we were looking at the
wrong place.

>
>The problem is that the LaserJet people put a lot of effort in allowing
>users to set defaults to be whatever they want, instead of always
>requiring drivers (and applications) to properly configure the printer.
>So, it seems that all your graphics applications just ASSUME that the
>printer is in portrait mode (instead of setting it), and just blindly
>send graphics.  Is this the fault of the printer?
>
>Why are you allowing users to alter the configuration of printers that hang
>off a network?  The spooler should be controlling all the settings as
>needed.  When a Lotus job is finished (or aborted), the spooler should
>reset the printer.
>
Well, even though we have our computers on ethernet for TCP/IP access to
our Suns, we haven't found any decent printspooling software for TCP/IP
(yes, our PC-NFS is just sitting on the shelf collecting dust :) ). So
our Laserjets are not on any network. In fact, most of our Laserjets
are dedicated for one machine only and some dataswitches here and there.
(we're not your biggest customer but aside from a dot matrix here and
there and two Laserwriters for the Macs, all our printers are Laserjets
sw we have enough to go around without networking). Anyways, we have a
university environment with grad students doing resarch. They produce
data files that are many columns long. And being Engineers that we are,
we have been using Lotus 123 since version 1 for processing data. And we
also need to print things out. Hence, landscape. Now if you are familiar
with Lotus 123, you change the printer mode by a setup string. Now we
have been teaching our students each year about setup strings and have
photocopy sheets of what you need to do what. Some get it, and some
don't. And those setup strings are so nasty that if you type in a lower
case "t" instead of uppercase "t" for example, things don't work, knock
on the door, debugging time. And those setup strings being 10-20
characters long, these errors happens often and it's annoying having to
type these bloody things in (correctly) each time. So we also have print
outs of the fonts and it's a lot easier for students to understand that
they need to change to font I20 for landscape compress than to have to
type in ^jy^h76&*jn for one and &^8hY&hj*7hn for another font. (note:
the above setup strings are garbage, they're just examples) And in a lot
of cases, after the students comes back from the field have 20 files of
data from the pressurememter, for example, they would just set the font
to landscape and copy the files to prn for hardcopies. No programs
involved. And when we program using a text editor, and we want to print
out our source code (ok, my programs do exceed 80 cols and goes off the
screen frolm time to time. But I'm a C programmer, I want to do
everything in one line. :) ), I print things in landscape because of
my code and I often use the space on the right side of the page for
writing down notes/comments. And none of our text editors has printer
mode changing capabilities within their print facility. So I have to do
it from the panel. I used QEdit most of the time. Hhmm.. let's see, 
those should be the main reasons with misc convenience reasons I don't
care to mention. But now that you say it is in the manual, the oversight
was on our part then. And nobody I've told knew about this either.
Oh well, we don't have to understand how a car works to know that we
don't make it do things that it couldn't do. Thanks for the info.

Thomas.