We may have found a solution (not flow control)... It does appear to be a timing issue with closing the port. One of the chaps in the office suggested a sleep command, and I have one in the "if" filter now prior to the :cl: evaluation. This has allowed me to print the larger test file. If this sorts the problem I will post again to confirm.
Kind regards
Angie
At 12:50 AM 9/19/03 +0300, you wrote:
Jim Easton wrote:
Software flow control: there is no way to guarranty that you won't loose data.I hope someone in the group may have solved this problem. I have to set up some serial printers, all HP lasers of one flavor or another.......
I can cat files (postscript) directly to the ports and get output. I can send files via LPRng and get output, but in both cases larger files are truncated.
Any ideas please?Kostis Mentzelos wrote;
Angie
This sound like flow control problem. With serial printers you need to configure the same flow control protocol to both printer and printcap.
man -a termios (ixon,ixoff,crtscts)
I agree, it's almost certain to be flow control, I remember this sort of thing from the "olden days" :-).
Just in case you don't know what we're talking about the idea is that if the buffer on the printer gets close to full it sends an xoff to the computer which causes him to stop sending. When buffer space becomes available the printer sends an xon which starts him going again. Xon and xoff are the control characters <DC1> and <DC3> or ^Q and ^S (See ASCII code chart).
There is also hardware flow control in which one of the lines (I don't remember the name of it) in the cable is raised which causes the hardware to stop sending.
On a unix system you can enquire about the status of the protocol using stty.
I expect there is a way to specify it in the printcap. It may very well already be enabled through the spooler (and indeed I can see no reason why it wouldn't be the default) but it isn't on the printer. As I recall there were hardware settings on some printers which enabled it.
If worse goes to worst slow it down - that way the buffer on the printer never gets full. I've had to do that out of plain desperation more than once.
Jim
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Why? Lets say that the printer sents a XOFF to spooler at 90% persent of buffer (usually a very small one) If the data speed is 115200 then the printer
buffer will be full before the spooler stops sending data.
On the other hand hardware flow control is not a standard thing for printers. (RTS/CTS, DTR/DSR, any combination of pins)
I will send you my printcap file for OKI printer ML280 with software flow control at 2400 kbps.
(there is a jumper setting for OKI dot matrix printers that sets the maximum buffer size)
kostis.
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