| Technote PR 18 | May 1987 |
When a job is initiated by the application, the driver establishes a connection with the printer via AppleTalk. When the job is completed, the driver closes the connection, allowing another job the opportunity to print. If each page is a job in itself, then the connection is closed and reopened between each page, allowing another application to print between the pages of the document, which, as you might imagine, could present a significant problem. If two people are printing to the same AppleTalk ImageWriter at the same time and their applications use the "spool-a-page/print-a-page" method of printing, the pages of each document will be interleaved at the printer.
Although there are good reasons for using this method of printing, it is only
useful for a directly connected printer. From a compatibility point of view,
this method of printing is built-in device dependence. Also, this method could
create serious problems for other types of remote devices. Therefore, we are
recommending that applications avoid using this method indiscriminately. You
should check available disk space to see how much room you have before you
print. If there isn't enough space for your entire document, then print as much
as you can (to minimize the interleaving) before starting another job. Whenever
possible, applications should use the print loop described on page II-155 in
The Printing Manager chapter of Inside Macintosh.
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