Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!steve
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Backgrounder/Printmonitor problems?
Message-ID: <19886@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 3 Feb 89 17:36:31 GMT
References: <46100271@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 63

In article <46100271@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> jacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
#>
#>I have a question about possible bugs with backgrounder/printmonitor in 
#>multifinder. The problem we encounter with our Laserwriter II NT and
#>printing seems to be related to it. In printing longer documents (10
#>pages or more it seems that only a portion of the document will be 
#>printed, and the rest does not. One person had a 10 page document, and
#>only 8 pages would print, he resubmitted the last pages several times
#>still no printing. Then exiting the program print monitor asked if the rest
#>of his print job was wanted, and then it printed.
#> 
#>My problem occurs with real long documents. I have a 100+ page manuscript.
#>I try to print the whole thing out, and will get 20 to 30 pages, then nothing.
#>The light on the printer is still flashing, but after 5 minutes I get a 
#>message that I have a printer error, and asks if I want to terminate the job.
#> 
#>The problem occurs with either Word or Wordperfect. In the first example 
#>when background printing was turned off the problem went away. I did not 
#>try this for the longer document, but suspect that the problem would go
#>away also.
#> 
#>My question is then, is this a known bug in backgrounder/printmonitor. If so
#>I guess I will have to leave this part of multifinder turned off????
#> 
#>Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
#>
#>Russ Jacobson
#>Illinois Geological Survey
#>jacobson@uiucuxe
#>jacobson%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu
#>jacobson%uiucuxe@uiuc.csnet
#>[ihnp4,pur-ee,convex]!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!uiucuxe!jacobson

You don't supply enough information to be sure but here are two
thoughts. First, when you print very large documents, the print
spool has to be stored temporarily on your hard disk (it has to
be stored there for short documents, too, but that's not the
point). Let's say the spool file is 15 megs and you only have 10
megs free on your hard disk. That happened to me once; I had to
restart and delete the spool file and break my document up into
smaller parts. When you do not print in the background,
presumably you do not generate such a large spool file and,
voila, no problem. You didn't say how much space there was on
your disk, though, so perhaps this isn't an explanation.

Second, you don't say from what program you are printing. I
mention this because PageMaker, for example, sometimes has
problems printing documents as short as 20 or 30 pages and
sometimes doesn't; I can't remember if I read this in the manual
or if somebody told me about it over the phone, but it has
happened to me more than once. In that instance, after a few
pages have printed, you get a
message about having lost contact with the printer (it's been a
while since its happened here so I could be off a bit). All you
can do is to keep resubmitting until everything prints. I'm not
sure, but I think this is a bug in the Aldus Driver, which is
unfortunately necessary to do some printing such as reversals.
On the other hand, the Aldus driver refuses to print in the
background (Aldus told me this was because Apple was so secretive
about releasing information about its system and drivers!) so
maybe this isn't your problem.

Steve Goldfield