Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!chinacat!woody
From: woody@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG (Woodrow Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: best method of commenting out blocks of postscript?
Summary: try it
Keywords: comment blocks
Message-ID: <1049@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG>
Date: 8 Mar 90 07:11:25 GMT
References: <22649@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <18106@rpp386.cactus.org> <153@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Distribution: usa
Organization: a guest of Unicom Systems Development, Austin
Lines: 43

In article <153@heaven.woodside.ca.us>, glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes:
> In article <1035@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG> woody@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG (Woodrow Baker) writes:
> 
> >Remember that the NEC 890 throws the comments away at the
> >serial input routine.  That is, if you test a line for a
> >comment, you will never see it on the NEC 890.
> 
> Nonsense.  The language scanner throws away comments, not the serial
> processor.  If you read the input stream as DATA (as with "readline"
> or "readstring"), you will get every single byte, including comments.

Sorry about this..but...I recently had to deal with a client with a local
printshop. This lady has a NEC-890.  She had just purchased ALL of
Cassidy and Greene's fonts.  Nearly $1000.00.  She could not get them to
work.  What would happen was this..The first time you downloaded a font
it would work.  After that if you downloaded ANY other Cassidy & Greene
font it failed.  It would hang.  I finaly traced the problem to the
following.  There was a preamble in the font.  It was ended with aline
like
%%%%%% end preamble
In order to avoid haveing to download the preamble the fonts would scan
the incoming stream, throwing away everything until it got to the
%%%%%% string.  This had the effect of throwing the preamble out.  Why
they did this, is anyones guess.  What happened was this:  on a QMS
or Apple printer, you could download fonts all day long, and everything
worked fine.  BUT on the NEC-890 the %%%%%%% line never was found.  Infact
NONE of the comment lines got through.  The preamble code would not find them
and just kept throwing the font away.  The preamble code first of all
checked for it's self in memory.  if it was not there, then it skipped
this routine and downloaded the font.  IF this sounds strange, it is.
I finaly worked around it.  This has been reported to C&G, and I
reported it to Adobe via usenet.  I got a message back to the effect that
the "bug report" (even though I didn't call it a bug) had been passed on
to the appropriate person.

As unbelievable as it sounds, it's true.
Glenn, please check things out first before labeling things as nonsense.
I can provide verification of this problem.  It DOES exist.
Cheers
Woody

P.S.  As far as I know, C&G has fixed the problem on thier end, though I
could not swear to it.