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From: wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu (Clarence Wilkerson)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers
Subject: Re: Found a bug in all Laserjets (??)
Message-ID: <7947@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 91 13:58:00 GMT
References: <1991Mar13.033650.3496@unixg.ubc.ca> <1991Mar13.052303.21648@hoss.unl.edu> <1991Mar13.144650@sdd.hp.com> <1991Mar14.194006.27516@unixg.ubc.ca>
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
Reply-To: wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu.UUCP (Clarence Wilkerson)
Organization: Purdue University, West Lafayette
Lines: 28

I think any program that prints to a printer without knowing or
forcing the printer into the correct mode is "sloppy", whether
you paid $0 or $500 for it. I have several programs that use graphics
in the landscape mode ( Harvard graphics, Windows stuff, TeX dvi drivers
etc), so I don't think it's a universal problem. Just because the
machine doesn't work the way one ideally imagines that it should,
doesn't mean that it's a bug. I think that on a 8088 chip,
MOV   DS,CS    should be a legal instruction. ( It's not.).

  On page 11-7 of Laser series II Printer Technical Reference Manual,
it says 
   " On the LaserJet series II, raster graphics rows are printed along
the width of the physical page, regardless of the logical page orientation....
"
A picture is provided at the bottom of the page to make this clear.

The result is that one has to massage the graphics output to
make it come out in the correct orientation. Basically the same massaging
has to happen
when you download fonts for the landscape mode that are intended for
the portrait mode. There is no internal PCL operation on the HPLJII to
rotate.
   The reason for these annoyances I suspect is the layout of physical
mmeory. It's easy to implement quicky raster rows that go along
successive memory locations and harder (slower) to do raster columns
that don't use adjacent bytes.

Clarence Wilkerson