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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: <1991Mar14.194006.27516@unixg.ubc.ca>
Date: 14 Mar 91 19:40:06 GMT
References: <1991Mar13.033650.3496@unixg.ubc.ca> <1991Mar13.052303.21648@hoss.unl.edu> <1991Mar13.144650@sdd.hp.com>
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Thank you for all the emails I've received. I'll just address all the
questions/comments here in one post.

- Thanks for all the support and sympathy. I thought my question was
  legitimate as well (I still can't find discussion on this topic
  in the manual)(And it looks like I'm not the only one who can't find
  it). I guess I caught Tony on a bad day and I just happened to have
  asked the "right" question at the "right" time. ;)
  Thanks again everybody.

- Yes, I think this is a major problem in MS DOS world. Thanks for all
  those who did the tests themselves. The only program I could get
  graphics printouts while the printer is in Landscape mode is MS Word.
  (Ooops, I think WordPerfect worked as well). Even the other "major"
  MS DOS packages such as Freelance, Lotus 123, Grapher, paint programs,...
  all failed. I haven't tried Windows get because we just got the new
  version of CorelDraw so I'll test it on that when I'm done. But if
  Windows doesn't work, this maybe something someone should look into.

- The concensous I got, and I agree with, is regardless of who's bug
  this is (HP or MSDOS programs), this is a "bug". As a programmer,
  the longest time taken in writing a program is during the testing
  debugging stage. You must test all combinations of all commands and
  make sure things work before you release the program. But of course
  someone somewhere will always try a combination that you've never
  thought of and crashes the program. ;) 

- Yes, I do agree that I shouldn't have to learn the PCL language to
  be able to use the Laserjet. The program is supposed to take care
  of all that. These things should be hidden from the enduser. And
  maybe that's why the Laserjet manual doesn't have this note boldface
  large lettering sticking out somewhere obvious. The only person that
  actually found something on this is found it in the PCL language
  section talking about how one would print in landscape in graphics mode 
  by moving the cursor to the right....etc. I didn't care to learn
  PCL now. When I have time in the future, I'd be interested in
  learning the language, but don't have time now.

Thanks again for all the responses. I'll try Windows and see if it
resets the printer into portrait mode before printing. If not, maybe
I should address this question in msdos appl programming group.

Thomas.