On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Tom McDonough wrote: > Thanks for confirming my suspicion that \f in the Perl shipped with mac os x > 10.2 might not be working properly (or at all). Is anyone out there getting > a form feed to work?
The problem may not be with Perl's \f. Print to a file, and see if \f produces 0x0C characters in the file. If it does, perl is fine. It seems you are expecting \f to be universally recognized by printer drivers, and converted to whatever the printer actually uses to end one page and start another. You are not attaching a real line printer to the Mac (I'm pretty sure this is not possible anymore). A laser printer will use either Postscript or PCL to describe a page; \f would have to be converted to a snippet of one of these languages and sent to the printer. It is very possible, probable even, that ghostscript, which is in many cases what you are depending on, ignores \f rather than trying to convert it. The long answer is for you to figure out how to translate the line printer commands into the proper codes for your printer, as someone else has already commented. The filters you are going through know how to convert text into Postscript or PCL etc, but typically they are designed for text and do not handle the ASCII unprintables. The short answer is that you are not using a line printer, and you cannot expect line printer control codes in ASCII to work in a modern, multi-language, batch-printing environment. Another facet is that Apple starting using the CUPS printing subsystem in 10.2, which likely changed all the print filters you are going through. It is more likely your problems are there, rather than in Perl. -- MattLangford
