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000136_news@newsmaster….columbia.edu _Fri Jan 30 09:20:44 1998.msg
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From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Subject: Re: Local Printing in Kermit 95
Date: 30 Jan 1998 14:20:41 GMT
Organization: Columbia University
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In article <6as2jp$5it$1@trog.dra.hmg.gb>,
Doug Pickering <djpickering@dera.gov.uk> wrote:
: I have a slight problem with an application using the local printing
: facility.
:
: A VMS job allows a user to print a VMS file directly to a laserjet printer
: attached to a users' PC via local printing. The job starts by switching
: to local printing then sending some initialisation characters to the
: printer to switch it to landscape and change the font.
:
: The job then starts to print lines of the output to the printer which all
: goes well until after every 100 lines of output the print job is
: interrupted to display how many lines have been processed.
:
: The effect of the status display is to end the print job and send it
: straight to the printer. The next portion of the job is then queued as a
: separate job, without the page formatting and often in the middle of the
: page.
:
: I have looked at the possibility of removing the status display and also
: the possibility of it breaking on page boundaries and re-initialising the
: printer. Both these solutions have undesirable drawbacks.
:
: The reason the status display is on the screen is because a piece of
: software checks for screen activity and if none is found within a preset
: time the user is disconnected. This was happening regularly and so the
: status line was put in. Up until now all the users have been using DOS
: but the move to NT is causing problems.
:
The best way to get a diagnosis, and hopefully a solution, is to collect
a session log that demonstrates the problem, and send it to:
kermit-support@columbia.edu
However, I can hazard a guess without the log. Assuming you are using VT
terminal emulation, host directed printing works in a very simple way:
there is one escape sequence to start printing, and another to stop, period,
as described on pages 54-55 of the Kermit 95 manual.
So what should Kermit do when it receives the "stop printing" sequence? If
this were a real terminal, there would not be any question -- it would
simply stop printing, because the printer is connected to the terminal
directly with a wire. Sending a character to the printer causes the
character to be printed immediately (recall that VT printing was designed
for dot-matrix printers, which, unlike laser printers, print a character at
a time, not a page at a time).
But in Windows matters are a bit murkier, because we are going through
who-knows-how-many layers of printer drivers, spoolers, buffers, etc, and
possibly also accessing the printer through a network. So if Kermit simply
stopped printing, then what would make the page come out of the printer? So
Kermit must "close" the print job when it gets a "stop printing" command.
What happens when Kermit closes the printer depends entirely upon the
printer driver, spooler, etc -- items that are invisible to Kermit and
beyond its control, but perhaps configurable by you.
: I am informed that KEATerm does not exhibit the same behaviour.
:
But then how does it know when to print a page without manual intervention?
To get the behavior you want, there would need to be additional protocol
in the escape sequences: one for "stop sending text to the printer but do
not close it", and another for "close the printer and force out the page".
There are no such commands in the VT terminal repertoire.
Anyway, let's have a look at the logs and we'll see what can be done.
- Frank