Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!gatech!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: ^D's
Message-ID: <8425@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 10 May 89 16:24:15 GMT
References: <8905091312.AA22444@decwrl.dec.com>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 44

In article <8905091312.AA22444@decwrl.dec.com> batcheldern@hannah.dec.com (Ned Batchelder, PostScript Eng.) writes:
>Although one of the reasons for not putting ^D in a file is that some
The Unix spoolers that are looking for the ^D echo will still get
>confused if it is a LaserWriter at the end of the wire. 
>

The echo of the ^D is an entirely different issue than the embedded
^D.  If you have an NEC 890 using the parallel interface you won't
see any echos but the ^D still resets the postscript VM.

>end-of-file marker to be used by spoolers (or application back-ends if they
>were spooling the file). They were never intended to be put into files.
>

And I will continue to insist that applications should never need to
know if their output is going to a device, file, or another process.

>PostScript model of printing, there are naturally many ways you could patch
>things to get it to work for you.  But if you patch it in the wrong way, it
>will work for ONLY you.  Putting ^D in files is the wrong patch.  The right
>patch is to arrange that a ^D is sent to the printer after the file is sent. 
>
>As a number of people have pointed out here, it isn't that difficult to get
>a ^D to a printer in MS-DOS.  If you make the small effort required,
>everything will work.

OK, let's accept the fact that there is a problem here, which is mostly
that ^D is not "white-space" when it actually is passed to the postscript
parser, or that end-of-job is not a plain-text postscript command.  Now
we have to decide where to fix it - you seem to suggest that all *dumb*
applications and drivers be made aware of whether or not they are
directly connected to a printer that needs the ^D or not.  This sounds
much more difficult to me than fixing the "postscript-aware" programs
to remove anything that isn't postscript - after all, they are supposed
to know about such things.  Anything that knows it is supposed to add
a ^D at the end can easily strip them anywhere else.  Keep in mind
just *how dumb* the dumb applications and drivers are - for example
the suggestion of making a batch file to add the ^D for MDOS will fail
if it is being called from another batch file unless that batch file
knows it is invoking another batch file.  Also if you transport it on
a floppy (a likely reason for writing to a file in the first place)
you have to make sure the support files go along.

Les